When hospitals need to expand bed capacity quickly—especially during surges of critically ill patients—they often turn to alternate care spaces. These temporary setups, however, may lack the built-in infrastructure of standard hospital rooms. That raises a critical question: without a wired nurse call system, how can patients easily ask for help?

In Massachusetts, healthcare leaders came up with an innovative answer while establishing Boston Hope—a 1,000-bed facility inside the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center designed for low-acuity and recovering COVID-19 patients.

Within just a few days, the team rolled out a cloud-based communication platform. Using tablets supplied by the hospital, patients could send requests directly to their assigned caregivers, who received alerts on their smartphones. This rapid, tech-enabled approach ensured communication lines stayed open even in a non-traditional care environment.