Bon Secours Mercy Health began its monitoring overhaul with 28 separate alarm policies and 50 monitoring domains spread across 48 care sites. It finished with one systemwide policy and 10 domains.
The consolidation took three years inside a 10-year initiative the system called Project Voyager, and it required more than new equipment. Bon Secours Mercy Health stood up five committees — executive alignment, clinical optimization, technical execution, change and sustainment, and an alarms committee — to keep a rollout of that size on schedule.
The clinical return showed up in the safety data. Uninterrupted monitoring from ED admission through transfer, paired with automated vital-sign capture into the EHR, helped drive a 24% year-over-year drop in serious safety telemetry events.
Jodi Pahl, DNP, chief nursing officer of Bon Secours Mercy Health, walks through what the system standardized, what it learned and where the work goes next.
Learnings include:
- How Bon Secours Mercy Health consolidated 28 alarm policies and 50 monitoring domains into one policy and 10 domains
- How a five-committee governance model kept a three-year, 48-site rollout on track
- How uninterrupted monitoring and automated vital-sign capture into Epic supported a 24% year-over-year drop in serious safety telemetry events
- Why front-line ownership proved as critical to adoption as the technology