By Healthcare Facilities Today

SAN MATEO, Calif.- AtHoc, Inc., the leader in network-centric interactive crisis communication systems, announced that Baylor Scott & White Health (BSWH), the largest not-for-profit healthcare system in Texas, has expanded its use of the AtHoc Critical Communications platform for IT outages, emergency preparedness and clinical alerts across the enterprise and has categorized it as a critical system within their IT infrastructure. AtHoc is deemed a critical communication tool to sustain the vital mission of the health system in providing safe and effective care to its patients.

Baylor Health Care System originally purchased AtHoc's platform for IT

alerting three years ago to notify their clinical IT systems users of

scheduled planned downtime events or unplanned systems interruptions

via desktop pop-ups. Scott & White Health also used AtHoc for emergency

preparedness situations for codes for severe weather, manmade or

natural disasters and security-related emergencies within their widely

dispersed hospital system. Now that the two organizations have combined

to create BSWH, comprising 43 hospitals and numerous ambulatory health

centers across central and northern Texas, AtHoc's solution will be

rolled out using the best practices from the two systems.

"We are rolling out AtHoc's mobile application on a limited basis to

the IT infrastructure team in the North Texas division of BSWH for use

during IT outage situations," said Leslie Leblanc, BSWH's vice

president of Electronic Health Records (EHR). "If a system goes down at

2 a.m., I can pick up my smartphone and alert my entire team and

relevant executives with the push of a button. Within two minutes, we

can have 50 critical team members on a bridge line responding to

whatever incident is occurring."

As a result of successful implementations during both IT-outage and

emergency-preparedness situations, BSWH's clinical personnel have also

adopted the AtHoc platform. Its ability to send instantaneous,

reliable, multi-modal alerts prompted clinical teams to use the

alerting technology for cardiac arrest and ST-Elevation Myocardial

Infarction (STEMI) notifications. Additional critical response teams

utilize the platform to alert of and respond to urgent and emergent

clinical situations throughout the growing healthcare organization's

various campuses and settings.

"Each phase of our AtHoc system implementation has involved a larger

scope of use cases, and we continue to find more operations critical

uses for it," said Lee Lavergne, manager, EHR & Clinical Systems, BSWH.

"We have consistently pushed the envelope of the AtHoc technology and

appreciate their responsiveness in projecting our evolving needs in

their product development roadmap."

"We provide our customers, in healthcare especially, with a critical

communications system that can be used every day, within a variety of

areas, so that it is already second nature to their personnel when a

crisis situation occurs," said John Tempesco, senior director of

healthcare at AtHoc. "We are honored to have a prestigious healthcare

system such as Baylor Scott & White as one of our visionary customers

keeping us on the cutting edge of innovation."

AtHoc's advanced solutions also bring enterprise-class, end-to-end

communication to major healthcare organizations such as Walter Reed

National Military Medical Center, Care At Home, Kaiser Permanente, U.S.

Department of Veterans Affairs, Raymond W. Bliss Army Medical Center,

Wilford Hall Medical Center and Irwin Army Hospital, Ft. Riley.

About AtHoc

AtHoc is the recognized leader, innovator and trusted partner in

network-centric interactive crisis communication systems. AtHoc's

products are used for physical security, employee protection, personnel

accountability, staff recall and regulatory compliance for military,

homeland security, government, healthcare, industrial and commercial

organizations.

Millions of end-users worldwide rely on AtHoc's unified notification

systems for their emergency alerting and critical communication needs

in organizations such as Microsoft, Eastman Chemical, USS-POSCO

Industries, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Baylor Scott &

White Health, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC),

UCLA, U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Homeland

Security.

AtHoc was recently awarded Government Security News' (GSN) 2012

Homeland Security Award for Best Mass Notification System and has also

been recognized by Gartner, Inc. as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for

Emergency Mass Notification Services and by IHS Inc. as The Fastest

Growing Mass Notification Software Supplier. For more information about

AtHoc, please visit www.athoc.com.