Vocera Aims For More Intelligent Hospital Interventions

Everyday scenes that Vocera Communications would like to eliminate from hospitals:

  • A nurse responds to an urgent change in the patient’s condition. While the nurse is caring for the patient, monitors continue to go off with alerts about the situation, distracting her and increasing the stress for both herself and the patient.

  • A monitor beeps in response to a dangerous change in a patient’s condition. A nurse pages the physician in charge. The physician calls back to the nurse’s station, but the nurse is off on another task. They play telephone tag while patient needs go unmet around the floor.

  • A nurse is engaged in a delicate operation when her mobile device goes off, distracting her at a crucial moment. Neither the patient she is currently working with nor the one whose condition triggered the alert gets the attention he needs.

  • A nurse describes a change in a patient’s condition to a physician, who promises to order a new medication. The nurse then checks the medical record every few minutes in the hope of seeing when the order went through. (This is similar to a common computing problem called “polling”, where a software or hardware component wakes up regularly just to see whether data has come in for it to handle.)

Wasteful, nerve-racking situations such as these have caught the attention of Vocera over the past several years as it has rolled out communications devices and services for hospital staff, and have just been driven forward by its purchase of the software firm Extension Healthcare.

Vocera Communications’ and Extension Healthcare’s solutions blend to take pressures off clinicians in hospitals and improve their responses to patient needs. According to Brent Lang, President and CEO of Vocera Communications, the two companies partnered together on 40 customers before the acquisition. They take data from multiple sources–such as patient monitors and electronic health records–to make intelligent decisions about “when to send alarms, whom to send them to, and what information to include” so the responding nurse or doctor has the information needed to make a quick and effective intervention.

Hospitals are gradually adopting technological solutions that other parts of society got used to long ago. People are gradually moving away from setting their lights and thermostats by hand to Internet-of-Things systems that can adjust the lights and thermostats according to who is in the house. The combination of Vocera and Extension Healthcare should be able to do the same for patient care.

One simple example concerns the first scenario with which I started this article. Vocera can integrate with the hospital’s location monitoring (through devices worn by health personnel) that the system can consult to see whether the nurse is in the same room as the patient for whom the alert is generated. The system can then stop forwarding alarms about that patient to the nurse.

The nurse can also inform the system when she is busy, and alerts from other patients can be sent to a back-up nurse.

Extension Healthcare can deliver messages to a range of devices, but the Vocera badge and smartphone app work particularly well with it because they can deliver contextual information instead of just an alert. Hospitals can define protocols stating that when certain types of devices deliver certain types of alerts, they should be accompanied by particular types of data (such as relevant vital signs). Extension Healthcare can gather and deliver the data, which the Vocera badge or smartphone app can then display.

Lang hopes the integrated systems can help the professionals prioritize their interventions. Nurses are interrupt-driven, and it’s hard for them to keep the most important tasks in mind–a situation that leads to burn-out. The solutions Vocera is putting together may significantly change workflows and improve care.

About the author

Andy Oram

Andy is a writer and editor in the computer field. His editorial projects have ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. A correspondent for Healthcare IT Today, Andy also writes often on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM (Brussels), DebConf, and LibrePlanet. Andy participates in the Association for Computing Machinery's policy organization, named USTPC, and is on the editorial board of the Linux Professional Institute.

   

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