Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust + Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Supporting seven hospitals
Pager replacement
increase in response rates
69.4% of alerts responded to within 30 seconds
near instant alert delivery, with 99% of messages sent within one minute
Faced with inefficiencies, poor visibility, and growing operational risk in time critical communication, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust partnered with Alertive to enable faster, clearer, and more reliable coordination between teams.
A clinician led approach underpinned the transformation, reshaping how staff communicate and respond in high pressure environments.
Legacy pager systems had become a significant barrier to efficient, safe communication across both Trusts. Managing over 5,400 devices across separate systems was complex and time consuming, while audits revealed that more than half were actually unused.
Crucially, these systems provided no meaningful data or reporting capabilities, leaving teams without the insight needed to monitor performance or improve workflows. Delays in alert delivery, sometimes exceeding four minutes, posed a direct risk to patient outcomes.
Combined with limited visibility and fragmented processes, this created an urgent need for a more reliable, transparent, and responsive communication system.
Both Trusts adopted a clinician centric approach to ensure the system worked effectively in real world clinical settings. A multidisciplinary steering group with varied representatives, led by the Chief Clinical Information Officer, defined key requirements including secure messaging, emergency alerting, and image sharing. Reliable performance in high pressure environments was particularly important to the group, which Alertive met through built-in redundancy, operating across Trust Wi Fi, 4G, and 5G networks with a further SMS fallback.
Alertive was then implemented with a phased rollout. This began with emergency roles in March 2022 and expanded to non-emergency teams by June 2022, with a dual running period with legacy systems continuing until mid 2023 to support a safe transition.
The rollout was supported by strong clinical safety governance and continuous frontline feedback. Issues such as device connectivity and alert volumes were refined iteratively to ensure safe and effective use in practice.
North West London Acute Provider Group Deputy CIO
There’s a perception that paging systems are super fast, but there’s a built-in delay that people don’t realise exists.
Deputy Chief Nurse Information Officer Br
This implementation marks a significant step toward reducing communication delays, supporting clinical workflows, and ultimately improving patient outcomes.
The transition to real time digital communication delivered immediate and measurable improvements in speed, reliability, and efficiency.
These changes created a more coordinated and responsive clinical environment, particularly in time critical situations.
Both Trusts are now expanding their use of Alertive to deliver further operational and clinical value, with additional use cases like hospital at night coordination and labour ward workflows already improving efficiency.
Platform insights are also being used to support workforce planning and resource optimisation, enabling a more data driven approach to service delivery.
