Middlesex Health Uses the Rave Critical Safety Solution to Protect Nurses From Workplace Violence

The Result

The feature proved valuable shortly after the pilot program started. A nurse was visiting a behavioral health patient in their home and set a safety timer in the Rave app for the length of the appointment. The patient became aggressive during the session and the nurse’s safety was threatened. The nurse was not able to escape outside of the house, so they barricaded themselves in a bathroom for protection. Unfortunately, the nurse was separated from her phone and could not call for help from the bathroom. The safety timer they set at the beginning of the appointment expired, and because there was no safety confirmation from the nurse, Middlesex Health was notified and emergency responders were sent to safely extract her from the patient’s home.

In addition to improving workplace safety for its nurses, Middlesex Health uses the Rave Platform to overcome employee communications challenges, manage employee health responsibilities related to COVID-19, and to improve disaster recovery and business continuity efforts.

Every day, Middlesex Health leverages the platform’s targeted notification and polling capabilities to fill open shifts. When a shift needs to be filled, a target list of employees receive text and email notifications with the open shift information and a prompt to respond if they’re available to fill the shift or not — reducing a time consuming process requiring lots of phone calls down to a few button presses.

During the Omicron COVID surge, Middlesex Health experienced unprecedented numbers of employees calling out sick due to the virus. ”During that time, we had close to 150 people calling out sick every day, and until that point, the worst it had been during COVID-19 was 25 to 30 people in a day.” The employee health department, consisting of two employees, was overwhelmed with the amount of data that needed to be recorded for each person calling out, how long they need to quarantine, when they were getting tested, when they would be back at work, and more.

Middlesex Health leveraged the Rave Platform’s SMS opt-in feature to engineer a streamlined process that could scale to the rapid increase in volume of employees calling out. Instead of calling the employee health department, sick workers were able to text a keyword to Middlesex Health’s short code number. They would receive a message back with a link directing them to a form where they could input all of their testing, recovery, and back-to-work timeline data. This process tweak helped eliminate the employee health department’s data entry backlog and allowed them to focus on more strategic tasks related to managing employee health during a pandemic.

Templates have been built out between Middlesex Health and Rave in the platform to enable a quick and informed response to incidents that happen on campus, like flooding. Before Rave, if there was a flood, environmental services employees would receive a notification directing them to investigate a potential issue in an area of the hospital. They would travel to the specified location, see that there is flooding, leave the location to gather the supplies they needed to remediate the issue, and finally travel back to the flood location to start fixing the problem. Today, Middlesex Health is able to eliminate additional steps in the process by sending an alert through Rave that tells environmental services what they are responding to, what needs to be brought to the site to remediate, and where they need to go. This efficiency made possible through Rave’s templated alerting capabilities “has improved our response times and saved us countless dollars in damages,” McGinty said.