The role of information technology in healthcare communications, efficiency, and patient safety: application and results.

The authors document the development and deployment of technology that serves to enhance healthcare communications, efficiency, and patient safety at an 881-bed, level 2 trauma center. This technology includes a patient-centric call process using real-time, rules-based task assignments and tracking software that guides personalized and timely response to the individual patient' needs and allows the mining of data for outcome analysis.