Years ago, many hospitals bought an Emergin messaging middleware system as a point solution to bring messaging to specific interfaced systems. Many of these were used to get event data out of nursecall and other systems that was communicated to caregivers or some other point of care use case. These point solutions were installed in closets or data centers and not given much more thought.

Inevitably, something changes in the systems connected to Emergin and an interface breaks. Getting help with these problems can turn out to be rather difficult. If your problem was caused by an update to the system interfaced with Emergin, a quick mitigation could be to roll back that update to the version that worked.

Emergin was acquired by Philips in 2007. The product is now called the Philips IntelliSpace Event Manager and has seen considerable changes and improvements since the Emergin days.

A short term fix (one which gets the components of your current Emergin system working again) will likely not be easy. There are 3 routes I would suggest you pursue for a short term fix:

  1. Contact your Philips sales rep and get a referral to the Philips/Emergin support team to see how they might help,
  2. Contact the vendor who provided whatever is on the other side of the Emergin interface that’s not working (e.g., your nurse call vendor, Vocera, phone vendor, etc.) and try to get them to fix your problem, or
  3. Contact a local or regional systems integrator who has experience with the old Emergin product (unless you already know one of these, this will likely require significant investigatory skills and some time). These integrators could also be nurse call system dealers, companies that resold Vocera (back when they had resellers), or a network VAR.

Eventually, your 10+ year old Emergin system will have to be replaced — and it may turn out that immediate replacement is your only option. The good news is that systems like Emergin’s have become more prevalent and more capable. The bad news is that the industry has pretty much moved past simple point solutions like the one you need to replace, to offering enterprise-wide messaging solutions. Things are more complicated (and more expensive) now. The upside is that these systems can do a lot more for you to improve patient safety, staff productivity and can better increase both patient and staff satisfaction.

Sorry to be the bearer of what is likely bad news.

If you’d like help assessing your situation, or replacing your Emergin system, let me know. If you want to consider an enterprise messaging solution, start here.

Unfortunately, I do not provide troubleshooting, service or repairs for Emergin systems.