For patients, families, and care teams to get seamless healthcare, effective communication is essential. The safety and care of patients, as well as the wellbeing of nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers, can all be impacted by a single link in the chain.
The goal of Vocera Communications Inc. is to improve patient, family, and care team members’ lives by streamlining clinical workflows, decreasing cognitive burden, and boosting safety.
Three business owners and coworkers who were looking for a better way to interact and collaborate launched Vocera Communications in 2000. What they accomplished permanently altered how people interact in hospitals and other mission-critical settings. The business released the first voice-activated, hands-free Vocera Badge in 2002. The most popular methods of care team communication at the time included shouting down the hallways, obnoxious overhead paging, and call-and-wait systems using landline phones. The Badge makes communicating considerably simpler, faster, and quieter.
For more than 20 years, Vocera Communications has been setting the standard for voice solutions technology, working to streamline workflows and enhance the daily lives of our clients and the communities they serve. The company initially embraced a number of technologies, including wireless and speech recognition, both of which are now widely used. The application of speech recognition has advanced significantly during the past 20 years. With the development of voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, people’s willingness to use speech as a user interface has significantly increased. But long before these voice assistants, the Vocera Genie allowed mobile workers to use simple voice commands to connect hands-free to the appropriate person or group.
More than 1,400 hospitals and health systems worldwide had chosen Vocera technologies by the time the one millionth Badge was shipped in 2018 in order for care teams to securely text using the business’ smartphone app, make calls with the wearable Badge, and engage patients and families with its care experience solutions. Vocera Communications now has more than 600 workers working from offices in the United States, Canada, Australia, India, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom, along with a growing product range.
Vocera products have been chosen by more than 2,100 facilities worldwide, including approximately 1,700 hospitals and healthcare facilities, to facilitate team members’ communication and collaboration.
With the launch of the VoceraSmartbadge in January 2019, a new category of wearable technology that blends smartphone usability with distinctive hands-free voice capabilities, Vocera Communications revolutionised mobile communication once more. The award-winning Smartbadge was developed specifically for the healthcare industry based on 20 years of client input. The user-friendly mobile device helps elevate patient care, safety, and experience while also enhancing clinician agility, streamlining processes, reducing interruption fatigue, and mitigating cognitive overload. The device’s designated panic button, which was created with the safety of the care team in mind, enables staff members to quickly summon assistance with only a touch of a button.
The business also released Vocera Vina in 2019, a ground-breaking new smartphone app. Clinicians inside and outside of the hospital can utilise the adaptable communication app, which delivers prioritised patient-centric calls, secure messages, and alarms in a single inbox and offers a straightforward user experience.
Vocera products have been chosen by more than 2,100 facilities worldwide, including approximately 1,700 hospitals and healthcare facilities, to facilitate team members’ communication and collaboration. Vocera Communications is at home in upscale hotels, assisted-living homes, shops, stores, schools, power plants, libraries, and more, in addition to the healthcare industry. Vocera products enable mobile workers to communicate instantly with others and swiftly access resources or information, increasing their safety and productivity.
Vocera Communications Product/Services Next Standard Of PPE
Vocera Communications and its staff had planned to commemorate 20 years of invention in 2020, but those plans swiftly lost steam as the organisation, the nation, and the entire world concentrated their efforts on responding to and combating COVID-19.
Healthcare professionals experienced a variety of difficulties prior to the coronavirus pandemic that led to stress, exhaustion, cognitive load, and burnout. Lack of adequate personal protection equipment was one of several job dangers and pressures (PPE). There is a potential of contamination every time clinicians put on or remove PPE. This is where voice-activated, hands-free communication is most useful.
Under their PPE, clinicians can use the Vocera Badge or Vocera Smartbadge to converse hands-free while staying at the patient’s bedside. Care teams members may immediately connect with one another using straightforward voice commands whether they are working in an isolation room, the ICU, or a triage tent inside or outside of a hospital, reducing the danger of contamination and protecting priceless PPE.
In order for care teams to work together via voice, text, and intelligent alerting to triage patients promptly and safely, the Vocera software platform has also proven essential. To enable just-in-time communication and short response times, the platform interacts with more than 150 clinical and operational systems, including EHRs, patient monitors, ventilators, and more.
There aren’t many isolation rooms at most hospitals. Some hospitals converted board rooms into isolation facilities during the COVID-19 crisis’ peak. Because of this, it’s critical that the designated nurse and infection prevention specialist are notified right away for effective triage, regardless of whether a patient tests positive or negative for COVID-19. In order to create room for another patient, a patient who tests negative may be removed from isolation. An alert about a patient’s COVID-19 test results can be automatically pushed from the EHR to the appropriate care team member’s hands-free device, smartphone app, or web interface since the Vocera Communications platform filters and prioritises information.
The severity of COVID-19 confirmed once more that at the point of care, clinicians require clear, contextual, and just-in-time information.
Design with the user in mind
When creating novel solutions, Vocera Communications uses a human-centered design methodology. Understanding present and potential consumers in their actual locations is the first step. Clinical executives, engineers, product developers, sales team members, and others from the organisation interview patients and other users to determine the issues that need to be resolved and why. Then, Vocera starts working on creating prototypes and discussing potential solutions with its user base.
When COVID-19 triggered patient surges, the business made sure its clients understood they weren’t alone and that the Vocera Communications team was there to support them, promptly and safely adapting to their changing demands.
The clinical team at Vocera Communications conducted online communication gap evaluations, created plans specific to each facility and circumstance, and carried out online execution of those plans. They provided direction and established urgent group protocols for assembling teams to respond to COVID-19 and infection control emergencies.
One of their clients required to alter the way patients moved through the emergency room and increase the space available for pop-up shops. The clinical team from Vocera Communications immediately joined them on the phone to undertake a series of 30-minute interviews with the hospital’s medical professionals, nurses, and support workers. The team swiftly created new communication workflows that their deployment teams were able to implement in a matter of days after gaining insight into what they needed. All of it was completed remotely, sparing the hospital’s already overworked resources.
Another client required flexible capacity and required the conversion of single-bed rooms into two-bed rooms. The customer requested that the team develop a solution for Vocera Communications devices that would let patients who are isolated use basic voice commands to safely and quickly connect with mobile care team members from their beds.
Their technical teams created a new feature for usage on the Badge on Smartbagde that would do all of that in response to the request.
