BC hospitals have world-class protocols carried by pagers, phone trees, and one nurse dialling.
MarcoMed sits alongside the PBX, the EMR, and the on-call roster — and turns a serial chain of phone calls into one simultaneous, acknowledged activation.
The protocol is written. The minutes are lost in the dialling.
Read the province's own STEMI workflow: the ED provider activates Code STEMI, then calls the interventional cardiologist, and the cath lab team is notified separately by call-out. Every arrow in that diagram is a human picking up a handset and hoping someone answers. Stroke Services BC names pre-hospital notification a pillar of hyperacute care — then leaves the carrying of it to whatever each site has. Marco is that carrier.
Six inbound lanes. One consistent voice.
Code STEMI, Code Stroke, Trauma, Sepsis. In most BC sites this is still the ED nurse phoning switchboard, switchboard paging the list one by one, then waiting for callbacks. Marco fans the activation out simultaneously and shows who acknowledged, in seconds.
Absorbs abandoned-in-queue calls at the main line during shift change, code events, and overnight staffing dips. Answered on the first ring, routed by your existing call tree.
Marco reads the live roster — VCH/PHC MOCAP on-call, Pathways BC specialist listings, Amion, QGenda, PetalMD, or the ward's shared spreadsheet — and pages the person actually on shift, not the name printed last month.
Structured intake from referring sites and rural EDs — patient identifiers, acuity, FAST-VAN or CTAS score, bed request — then pages the accepting service and the receiving ED at the same time.
When a site goes on diversion, Marco answers the closed ED's line with the current redirect, logs every caller, and notifies the on-call administrator. No unanswered ring at a dark department.
Live Punjabi, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Farsi, Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese. Handles the reception-level call without burning a paid interpreter-line minute.
Alongside your PBX, EMR, and paging — never in place of.
MarcoMed is a voice + logic layer. It receives the calls your Cisco / Avaya / Mitel PBX routes to it, executes your protocol, and hands off to the systems you already trust.
What BC emergency departments actually run on today.
Drawn from public health-authority documents, provincial guidelines, and the authorities' own published clinical workflows. Not vendor marketing.
Sources: CST Cerner clinical workflow library (In-Field / Transfer STEMI), Fraser Health Overhead Paging corporate policy, Island Health SMaCCS evaluation (Vocera), VCH–PHC On-Call & MOCAP application portal, Stroke Services BC 2025 Provincial Pre-hospital Triage and Transport Guideline, and Postmedia's analysis of Ministry of Health ED closure data.
The province has the protocols. It does not have the layer that carries them.
Island Health's own SMaCCS evaluation states plainly that current modes of communication — pagers, fax, and telephone — are inadequate for contemporary clinical needs, requiring laborious manual processes.
The CST Cerner STEMI workflow has the ED provider activate Code STEMI and then call the interventional cardiologist, with the cath lab team notified separately by call-out. Each link is one human dialling one number.
VCH/PHC on-call scheduling and MOCAP sit in an internal web application. Switchboard reads it; nothing dials from it automatically.
Fraser Health maintains a formal overhead paging policy. It is a broadcast to a physical space — not a routed, acknowledged message to a named person.
Across these workflows, nothing records who received an activation, when, and whether they responded. Escalation depends on someone noticing the silence.
Nearly 2,400 temporary ED closures were recorded in B.C. between 2023 and 2025 — at least one department closed on more than 900 of 1,095 days. Those phone lines do not close with the doors.
Data resident in Canada (AWS ca-central-1 / Azure Canada Central). PHIPA, PIPA-BC, PIPEDA-aligned. US health systems served from HIPAA / HITECH-compliant regions with BAA in place.
Procurement-ready from day one.
Full documentation package for your Privacy Officer, CMIO, and CIO — PIA / TRA templates, BAA, DPA, penetration test summary, and a named clinical safety officer.
Start with one ward.
Measure the silence recovered in 30 days.
We deploy MarcoMed on a single unit — often after-hours nurse-line or a specialty clinic within the hospital — with your protocol, your voice, your escalation. You keep the log. You keep the metrics. You decide.