Streamlining healthcare communication for patients, families, and care teams is paramount for ensuring seamless experiences and optimal patient care. Even a minor breakdown in communication can have far-reaching consequences on patient safety and the well-being of healthcare professionals.
With a commitment to enhancing the lives of patients, families, and care team members, Vocera Communications Inc. endeavors to simplify clinical workflows, alleviate cognitive burden, and enhance safety protocols.
Established in 2000 by three visionary entrepreneurs seeking innovative communication solutions, Vocera Communications revolutionized communication practices in hospitals and other critical environments. Introducing the pioneering hands-free, voice-controlled Vocera Badge in 2002, the company transformed the landscape of care team communication. Prior to this innovation, conventional methods such as shouting down hallways, loud overhead paging, and cumbersome landline phone systems prevailed. The Vocera Badge ushered in an era of efficient, rapid, and noise-free communication within healthcare facilities.
For over two decades, Vocera Communications has been at the forefront of voice solutions technology, dedicated to streamlining workflows and enhancing the daily lives of both customers and the individuals they serve. Technologies such as wireless connectivity and speech recognition, once pioneering concepts, have now become commonplace. The evolution of speech recognition over the past 20 years has been remarkable, with the widespread adoption of voice-activated interfaces like Alexa and Siri. However, long before these advancements, Vocera Genie empowered mobile workers to connect hands-free through simple voice commands.
In 2018, the shipment of Vocera’s one-millionth Badge marked a significant milestone, with over 1,400 hospitals and health systems worldwide selecting Vocera technologies. These solutions enable care teams to securely communicate via the company’s smartphone app, make calls using wearable Badges, and engage patients and families through its care experience solutions. Alongside the expansion of its product portfolio, Vocera Communications has also seen growth in its employee count, employing over 600 individuals globally across offices in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom.
To date, more than 2,100 facilities worldwide, including nearly 1,700 hospitals and healthcare facilities, have chosen Vocera solutions to facilitate seamless communication and collaboration among team members.
In January 2019, Vocera Communications once again revolutionized mobile communication by introducing the VoceraSmartbadge, a groundbreaking wearable device that combines the functionality of a smartphone with unique hands-free voice capabilities. Tailored specifically for the healthcare industry based on two decades of customer input, this award-winning Smartbadge enhances clinician agility, streamlines workflows, minimizes interruption fatigue, reduces cognitive overload, and enhances patient care, safety, and experience. Featuring an intuitive design, the device includes a dedicated panic button, empowering staff members to summon assistance swiftly with a simple touch.
Additionally, in 2019, the company unveiled Vocera Vina, an innovative smartphone application that revolutionizes communication. This customizable app delivers prioritized patient-centric calls, secure messages, and alerts through a unified inbox, providing clinicians with an intuitive user experience both within and beyond the hospital setting.
With over 2,100 facilities worldwide, including nearly 1,700 hospitals and healthcare facilities, selecting Vocera solutions to facilitate communication and collaboration, the company has made its mark beyond healthcare, extending into luxury hotels, aged care facilities, retail stores, schools, power facilities, libraries, and more. Vocera solutions enhance the safety and effectiveness of mobile workers by facilitating instant communication and rapid access to resources and information.
PRODUCTS/SERVICES of Vocera Communications: Next Standard of PPE
Celebrating 20 Years of Innovation: Initially slated for a celebration of two decades of innovation, Vocera Communications, along with its employees, redirected its focus in 2020 towards responding to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Challenges in Healthcare: Healthcare workers encountered numerous challenges before the onset of the pandemic, including stress, fatigue, cognitive burden, and burnout. Additionally, a significant concern was the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), which heightened the risk of contamination each time clinicians donned or doffed their PPE.
Hands-Free Communication: The introduction of hands-free, voice-controlled communication proved invaluable in mitigating these risks. With Vocera’s innovative solutions such as the Vocera Badge or Vocera Smartbadge, clinicians can now communicate seamlessly while wearing PPE. This enables them to stay connected without leaving the patient’s bedside, whether they are working in a triage tent, the ICU, or an isolation room within or outside the hospital.
Minimizing Contamination Risk: By utilizing Vocera’s hands-free communication devices, care team members can issue simple voice commands to connect swiftly, thus minimizing the risk of contamination and conserving essential PPE.
Furthermore, the Vocera software platform plays a pivotal role in facilitating collaboration among care teams through voice, text, and intelligent alerting to efficiently and safely triage patients. Integrating with over 150 clinical and operational systems, including Electronic Health Records (EHRs), patient monitors, and ventilators, the platform enables real-time communication and swift response times.
In hospitals where isolation rooms are limited, especially during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, the need for efficient patient triage is paramount. To address this, immediate notification of a patient’s COVID-19 test results to the assigned nurse and infection prevention specialist is crucial for appropriate triaging. By leveraging the Vocera Communications platform, which filters and prioritizes information, alerts regarding a patient’s test results can be automatically delivered from the EHR to the appropriate care team member’s hands-free device, smartphone app, or web console.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the urgency for clinicians to access clear, contextual, and timely information at the point of care. With no time to spare searching for information or struggling to communicate, clinicians require information to be readily accessible and pushed to them while they are on the move. Vocera Communications recognizes this imperative and offers a platform designed to reduce the cognitive burden on frontline healthcare workers by delivering purposeful communication and pertinent information centered around the patient, thereby promoting safe and effective care delivery.
Human-Centered Design at Vocera Communications
Vocera Communications adopts a human-centered design approach to innovate its solutions, beginning with a deep understanding of current and potential users within their real-world contexts. This involves engagement with frontline healthcare workers and other stakeholders to identify challenges and articulate the reasons behind them. Subsequently, Vocera leverages this insight to develop prototypes and share potential solutions with its user community.
Throughout the engineering design and development process, Vocera actively incorporates customer feedback, facilitating the creation of technology and solutions tailored to meet critical needs in healthcare settings.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Vocera reaffirmed its commitment to its customers, offering unwavering support and responsiveness to their evolving requirements. The company’s clinical team conducted communication gap assessments remotely, crafting customized plans tailored to each facility’s unique circumstances. Additionally, they provided guidance and established urgent group workflows to aid in mobilizing infection control and COVID-19 response teams, all executed remotely to ensure safety and efficiency.
Rapid Response to Customer Needs
In one instance, a Vocera Communications customer sought assistance in redesigning patient flow within the emergency department and expanding its footprint to accommodate pop-up locations. To address this challenge, Vocera’s clinical team promptly conducted a series of 30-minute interviews with the hospital’s physicians, nurses, and administrative staff. Armed with valuable insights into their requirements, the team swiftly devised new communication workflows, which were implemented by deployment teams within days. Notably, all of this was accomplished remotely, alleviating strain on the hospital’s already taxed resources.
Similarly, another customer approached Vocera with the need to enhance capacity by converting single-bed rooms to two-bed rooms. They requested a solution that would allow patients in isolation to communicate with mobile care team members using simple voice commands from their beds. In response, Vocera’s technical teams developed a new capability for use on the Badge and Smartbadge devices, meeting the customer’s request while surpassing expectations.
