TigerConnect has announced the acquisition of the healthcare middleware provider Critical Alert. The acquisition will allow TigerConnect to add a host of new capabilities to its clinical communication and collaboration platform to better meet the communication needs of healthcare providers.
Critical Alert is a provider of enterprise-grade, cloud-native, mobile-first middleware to the healthcare industry. The company’s solutions have extensive capabilities including alarm and event management, medical device interoperability, nurse call, and clinical workflow analytics. The company also provides nurse call hardware to over 200 hospitals in North America.
TigerConnect is the leading clinical communication and collaboration platform provider in the United States. Its CC&C platform is used by more acute care providers than any other platform. The CC&C platform has been shown to improve communication efficiency across virtually all areas of hospitals, helping to lower costs, improve quality of care, boost staff morale, and improve patient satisfaction.
TigerConnect will be incorporating the Critical Alert middleware products into the TigerConnect platform, which will add a wide range of alert types and deliver alarm management enhancements. The integrations are expected to be completed by the end of Q1, 2021.
The timing of the acquisition could not come at a better time. The healthcare industry is under tremendous pressure due to COVID-19. Burnout is common among nurses and there is already a chronic shortage of nurses in healthcare. Critical Alert middleware will help to ease the burden on nurses by improving efficiency. Critical Alert middleware seamlessly integrates with clinical systems and is used to transmit alarms, events, and values, and provides virtualized nurse calls that include contextual patient data, which allows nurses to easily prioritize calls. The centralized answering of nurse call alerts helps with workflow management and assignments, reducing noise and clinical interruptions, and improving responsiveness.
The real-time Location Systems (RTLS) integrations improve efficiency with caregivers, helping to streamline their workflows. Staff can be easily tracked along with the time they spend on specific tasks. The insights provided help hospitals with resource planning and improving workflows to make them more efficient and eliminate wasted time.
Critical Alert will integrate with the TigerFlow care team collaboration solution, which will allow alerts to be intelligently routed to the right caregivers to further improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary noise. Since these alerts include context, it will make it easier for caregivers to prioritize.
“We see the Critical Alert acquisition as highly strategic and a natural evolution of our already-robust collaboration platform,” said Brad Brooks, CEO and co-founder of TigerConnect. “For the hundreds of thousands of nurses that currently use TigerConnect, these new capabilities will deliver real-time, contextual information to their mobile device or desktop to allow them to work smarter, prioritize responses, and efficiently coordinate care, all within the same reliable TigerConnect platform they use every day for enterprise messaging.”
Critical Alert CEO John Elms will join the TigerConnect team as Chief Product Officer. Elms will assist with the integration the Critical Alert middleware into the TigerConnect platform and will play a key role in developing future product offerings. VP of Sales for Critical Alert, Wil Lukens, has been appointed as General Manager of Critical Alert’s traditional Nurse Call hardware unit, which will operate as a standalone business unit.
“The timing of the deal and the fit of these two companies aligned perfectly,” said John Elms, CEO of Critical Alert. “Two best-in-class, highly complementary solutions coming together to solve some of the chronic challenges—alarm fatigue, response prioritization, resource optimization—that have driven nurse teams to the brink. Together, these unified technologies will make care professionals’ lives easier, not harder, and I couldn’t be more excited to lead the TigerConnect product organization into this next chapter.”