During community catastrophies, regular and cell phone service may be disrupted. Without availability of these services, alternate forms of communication must be relied upon.
It is critical to develop communication strategies which include redundant forms of communication in advance of these events.
Redundant communications can include:
- Basic telephone systems
- In-building wireless phone systems
- Overhead announcement and paging systems
- Nurse call system
- Voice over Internet Protocol systems
- Cell phones
- Beepers and pocket pagers
- Enterprise systems
- BlackBerries and similar devices
- Text messaging
- Text-to-voice translation
- Communication systems for the deaf and hearing impaired
- Telephonic translation lines and services
- Access control systems
- Fax machines
- Hospital television network systems
- E-mail
- Mass notification systems
- Hospital electronic bulletin boards
- Intranet message posting
- Bed-tracking and facility status reporting systems
- Electronic health record systems
- Enterprise systems for networked hospitals
- Resource and grant-asset tracking systems
- Evacuee and disaster patient tracking systems
- Emergency medical services communication systems
- Emergency desktop and mobile handheld programmed radios
- Communication with emergency operations centers
- Public health monitoring and notification systems (syndromic surveillance systems, threat notification systems, outbreak management systems)
- Satellite radio and communication systems
- Ham radio systems
- Human runners (the low-tech communication system if all else fails)
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