Good Samaritan Medical Center, Kearney NE

Healthcare facilities have some of the most demanding communication needs of any application. In an emergency situation, most other applications require all encompassing notification – evacuation for example – but in hospital and medical centers their emergency needs also include immediate paging and specific response over areas both large and small. And with a wide variety of specialties and departments, urgent paging is often required simultaneously.

The Good Samaritan Medical Center in Kearney, NE is one such center. This regional medical complex provides care for some 350,000 residents in Nebraska and Kansas. It was in need of a full featured paging and messaging system to accommodate its core center, remote clinics, and planned future buildings. As in most healthcare facilities, the system needed to incorporate a variety of integral input sources. Microphone paging stations, zone telephony and data communication paging, background music, and safety systems including fire and severe weather alarms needed to be built-in. System supervision and monitoring needed to be in-depth to assure system availability and widely varying ambient noise levels that require automatic volume adjustments.

The IED 8000 system was selected to support all required features today and provide the ability for unlimited expansion into the future. The main buildings included 34 zones with complete supervision and automatic backup amplifier switching for redundant system protection. IED utilized ambient analysis and control to maintain appropriate volume levels in each zone; this real time feature automatically adjusts to the suitable listening level whether pages are in the middle of the night while patients are sleeping or in the busy and crowded ER.

Since the initial project design and installation, Good Samaritan has already expanded on their system to include new buildings. Two additional 8000 systems were installed in subsequent new building developments and are networked to the main system, yet provide standalone operation for local paging and distributed fault tolerance.