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Extension Healthcare Hires Alarm Safety-Focused Chief Nursing Officer
[December 16, 2014]

Extension Healthcare Hires Alarm Safety-Focused Chief Nursing Officer


Extension Healthcare announced today that it has hired Dr. Mary Jahrsdoerfer, PhD, RN, as Chief Nursing Officer to lead its growing Clinical Solutions Team. Mary's clinical practice experience combined with her academic and publishing success on the issue of alarm safety makes her a valuable addition to Extension Healthcare's leadership team.

"Advanced alarm systems management requires a multidisciplinary approach that bridges the gaps between IT, the nursing informatics department, and the clinical providers and executives," said Todd Plesko, CEO at Extension Healthcare. "Mary's expertise will assist hospitals in establishing a baseline of knowledge of their existing alarm challenges, and a foundation to initiate an improvement strategy designed to comply with The Joint Commission's new National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) on clinical alarms as well as the existing NPSG (02.03.01) addressing challenges communicating lab results."

As CNO, Mary will work closely with clients, prospective clients, media, industry influencers, healthcare associations and nursing leadership groups. Her primary objective will be to further awareness of the next generation alarm safety and event response enterprise platform developed by Extension Healthcare for hospitals. She will create and lead the Extension Healthcare User Advisory Group whose function is to discuss new and ongoing clinical workflow challenges and how the Extension Engage platform can serve to mitigate some of those challenges. Additionally, she will act as the voice of the Extension clinical team during product development to continuously promote innovation aimed at improving workflow processes, meaningful communication among care providers, patient safety, and optmization of technology deployment and utilization.



"Clinical alarm fatigue is much more than just medical devices," said Jahrsdoerfer. "It's all nursing interruptions: patient calls, bed exit alarms, lab results, clinical orders, text messages, and more," she continued. "Interruption fatigue is pushing hospital leaders to consider how communications and clinical alarms are related to their overall noise reduction strategies.

Mary has her clinical foundation as a critical care nurse, with a focus in cardiology. With over 2 decades of experience in hospital leadership and program development, her career interests grew to emerging healthcare technologies specific to patient safety where she spent another decade in the industry working with patient monitors and health information technology. At Philips (News - Alert) Healthcare, she used evidenced-based research, publication in peer-reviewed journals, and public speaking to disseminate her message.


Mary has a BSN from Stony Brook University; an MHA from Long Island University; and a PhD from UMass Amherst. Mary is a Registered Nurse and member of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society.

Connect with Mary on LinkedIN.

About Extension Healthcare

Extension Healthcare is leading the industry into the next generation of clinical alarm safety systems. Extension has merged advanced alarm management software with an innovative communications approach that enables clinical collaboration to occur in response to patient-related critical events via event driven secure text messaging and voice. The Extension Engage™ solution provides an advanced clinical rules and workflow engine that delivers intelligent notifications based on key contextual alarm, patient, and care team data. These intelligent notifications are securely routed to the appropriate staff members via their preferred communications device to support informed clinical engagement across the complete hospital enterprise. Through Extension Engage, clinicians can instantly initiate informed responses to critical events through secure text response and voice call and engage their patients and other members of the care team from any location. Extension Engage Medical Device Alarm Notification has been granted FDA 510k Class II clearance for secondary notification.

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