Is the future of healthcare communications going to be found in Apple's I-Phone? According to Voalté (Sarasota, Florida), a start-up that specializes in data interfaces, that answer is yes. The company along with Emergin (Boca Raton, Florida), a Royal Philips Electronics (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) company has developed what it says is an alert management platform to deliver notifications to Apple iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
The company said this integration helps with the orchestration of voice, alert, and text communications. In the past clinicians were bogged down with way too many devices that essentially were doing the same thing.
“Nurses were frustrated. They were carrying multiple pagers and PDAs,“ Trey Lauderdale, VP of Innovation for Voalté told Medical Device Daily. “Our method of thinking when coming up with this interface is why all these devices can't be that one device clinicians are looking for. We looked at smart phones which are really just portable computers to help answer that question.“
Voalté One is a unified communications solution that enables phone calls across the hospital VoIP system, text messaging via the user directory and user-friendly alert management through Emergin's interface adapter. This interface is said to help caregivers receive and respond to alert messages dispatched by Emergin from multiple data systems and devices within the hospital.
The solution is primed to go in nearly 10 hospital systems, according to Lauderdale.
After what Voalté said was an onsite workflow analysis, the company worked with several hospitals and Emergin to design an implementation plan to create a much stronger communication system.
Typically an initial implementation phase focused on replacing the pager with the iPod Touch, which was then integrated to Philips monitoring through an Emergin Patient Monitoring Gateway. Low and high priority ringtones were assigned to yellow and red alerts to automatically notify caregivers to the level of importance for the message.
The Emergin/Voalté solution also enables “quick messaging“ on the iPod Touch to facilitate real-time communication between caregivers.
“One of the things we wanted to do was to get the clinicians engaged,“ Lauderdale told MDD. “We really wanted to get their feedback when we developed this solution.“
As a result of the solution being implemented, the company said that it felt as if hospital hallways were quieter and pages were all routed through one simple device.
In the case of Sarasota's implementation of the Emergin/Voalté solution, overhead paging frequency was reduced by 78%.
Following the success of the Emergin/Voalté integration at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Huntington Hospital has initiated a project to replace legacy phones with iPhones and extend the Emergin/Voalté solution to the hospital's in-house phone system.
“We were using antiquated pagers to receive alerts from our Philips patient monitors,“ said Eunie Lee, RN at Huntington Hospital. “The pagers were slow and information was difficult to understand. Now we have clear, up-to-date notifications right at our fingertips.“
Huntington clinical staff will have voice, alert and text communications on one device. Phone numbers will automatically link to user names and each user will retain the same extension, regardless of device, further optimizing communications.
“I think that five years from now anything that a clinician needs to access is going to be on one of these devices,“ Lauderdale told MDD. “I'm sure of it.“
Omar Ford, 404-262-5546;