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Benefits of Smartphones in Hospitals

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What makes a Voalte nurse a happy nurse? Let’s start with easier communication, more time by the bedside, fewer unnecessary interruptions and a faster response time. Follow that up with less overhead noise and fewer med administration errors, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for job satisfaction. Take a look at our new infographic and imagine how it would feel to make your nurses this happy.


No Easy Test

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Hospitals are known as an unfriendly wireless environment. Where a typical office network can support a couple of wireless devices per worker with one access point, hospitals are large buildings with thick concrete walls, requiring hundreds of access points to keep mobile devices connected. In addition to phones, hospitals house thousands of other wireless devices – from smart beds to infusion pumps – that require a persistent connection for patient safety and staff workflow. MRI and CAT Scan machines add to the challenge by generating huge electrical transients that can disrupt Wi-Fi transmission.

Now we’re replicating those difficulties right here at Voalte. We recently moved from almost entirely manual testing to a largely automated process. We did it by hiring a team of dedicated, in-house engineers to create the Voalte Test Lab with custom-built tools that run on networking hardware from several different vendors. Their mission: Create an architecture that simulates the network environment and roaming behaviors in a hospital, and find ways to disrupt it.

According to QA Test Automation Engineer Jim Bass, who brings decades of experience in functional and stress testing from Emergin and Telematics, “We needed to simulate situations such as when a nurse goes into a bathroom with a patient for five minutes, or if someone brings their iPhone into an elevator where it is out of touch with access points, or when a charge nurse is walking from one station to another, roaming from access point to access point and possibly switching Wi-Fi bands. Once we created that type of environment, we built automated stress tests to punish the system.”

One method of punishment developed by Jim and QA Test Automation Engineer Michael Nagy involves forcing iPhones to “roam” by programmatically changing the power level on different access points. Other tests involve flooding iPhones with text messages or voice calls, then dropping access points coincident with activating roaming and interference simulation. 

Through this exhaustive testing at the Voalte Test Lab, we can build highly resilient products that work across a wide variety of customer networks before we even get close to a hospital installation. Using a sophisticated test methodology and hardware from various wireless network companies such as Cisco Systems, Meru Networks, Aruba Networks and Enterasys, we have a much deeper understanding of how future Voalte releases will work on a wide variety of customer networks.

1 Month, 3 Million Texts

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We keep track of how our customers are using our products so we can constantly improve the technologies we offer. Recently, we’ve seen steady growth in the number of text messages nurses send every day to communicate with their hospital colleagues. In July alone, we tallied over 3 million texts!

We’re also hearing from nurses how much they value the fusion of voice, alarms and text in a single, shared device. The ability to switch seamlessly from one type of communication to another without juggling multiple devices and apps is still a novelty in most hospitals. Smartphones are unique in making that switch intuitive – and even fun – with a user interface that nearly everyone enjoys using.

For buying administrators making major purchasing decisions, “fun” probably isn’t at the top of your list of criteria. But when you think of the money wasted on devices that find their way to the back of a drawer when the shininess wears off, “fun” makes a lot of fiscal sense. Hospital employees have struggled for years with clinical communication devices that are poorly designed and challenging to use. When presented with the nearly universal appeal of today’s smartphones, most caregivers become highly engaged enthusiasts of the new technology.

Our customers agree that nurses are clamoring for an intuitive communication device that makes their jobs easier. At one Midwestern pediatric hospital, nurses even coined a new term: Voalte Envy. After nurses in one unit were up and running on Voalte One, those from other units were asking administrators when they were going to get their own Voalte smartphones. Have you ever heard of caregivers being envious of those carrying pagers or other legacy communication devices?

By sending over 3 million text messages last month, nurses are showing us that texting is no longer a nice extra, it’s an essential form of clinical communication. As Voalte smartphones become more useful and valuable to our customers, we are seeing even higher levels of user engagement. Caregivers continue to use Voalte smartphones long after the initial rollout because they continue to gain value from them. If they didn’t find them useful, we wouldn’t see these numbers growing so rapidly.

As we enhance our current products and build new ones, we hope to further engage customers at even higher levels, always with the goal of helping caregivers spend more time with their patients.

Getting It Right

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With Voalte technology now in more than 30 hospitals throughout the country, and another 30 projects in the works, we’ve encountered all types of technical infrastructures, numerous clinical workflows and some ambitious plans for future advanced integrations. The challenges and goals are different in every facility. That’s why before going live with a smartphone implementation, we always advise customers to evaluate your existing infrastructure, engage your clinical team and carefully plan your rollout strategy.

That’s exactly what they did at St. Joseph Mercy Oakland, a community teaching hospital in Pontiac, Michigan, and a member of the CHE Trinity Health system. As part of a long-term plan to roll out Cerner’s next-generation electronic medical records (EMR) mobility application, St. Joe’s first turned to Voalte. By building a strong foundation with Voalte, the hospital is giving their staff time to become familiar with smartphones and our simple Voalte One user interface before they jump into the full functionality of EMR. (See the Case Study for details on how St. Joe’s nurses are using Voalte One.)

This project was a perfect example of hospital staff and technology vendors working together to provide an effective solution for hospital nurses. St. Joe’s leadership, from CEO to CMIO to CNO, took responsibility for driving innovation by pulling together Voalte, Hill-Rom, Cerner and others. The IT team, under the direction of Robert Jones, held weekly workflow meetings, encouraged open communication between IT and Clinical, and set clear expectations for the project’s goals.

The project team did a fantastic job of keeping all the parts moving, with each member empowered to contribute their expertise, from wireless and network security to telecom and hardware. Using a production pilot unit, the team thoroughly tested the latest nurse call, smart bed, EMR and Voalte technologies. This set the stage for every phase of the project before taking a single step toward implementation.

As hospitals grapple with how to meet Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements, we’re pleased to point to a successful example of how one hospital is getting it right. We look forward to working with St. Joseph Mercy Oakland, the rest of the CHE Trinity Health system, and other healthcare facilities throughout the country to continue creating the hospital of the future.

What Are Your Patients Saying About Your Hospital?

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“It takes 20 years to build a reputation, and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
- Warren Buffett


With the growing popularity of online reviews, Warren Buffett may want to revise that timeframe to more like five seconds. Customers are sharing their experiences on websites like Yelp, Angie’s List and Yahoo! Local, pulling the sheet back on everything from bed bugs at a 5-star hotel in New York City to a rude cashier at the local sandwich shop. One disgruntled customer has the power to sway thousands of opinions. 

Now hospital “customers” also have an outlet to express their views on the quality of service at acute care hospitals. Our latest white paper, “Staying Ahead of the HCAHPS Curve,” points out that the HCAHPS survey has become a vital indicator of patient satisfaction. Scores are published on Hospital Compare, a U.S. Department of Health & Human Services website, helping shape the public’s perception of your healthcare facility.

Obviously, times have changed since patients checked in at their community hospital based on the word-of-mouth experiences of friends and neighbors. Now they have numerous choices when it comes to healthcare, and online recommendations come from thousands of patients who take the time to complete the HCAHPS survey. The most recent reported scores are based on more than 2.9 million completed surveys from patients at 3,892 hospitals across the country. The survey is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Vietnamese.

While patient satisfaction should already be a top priority for caregivers, the growing impact of HCAHPS is pressing hospital leaders to explore ways to improve scores. Our white paper shows how smartphones can help in two key areas that patients rate as critical to their overall experience: improving response to nurse calls and reducing unnecessary noise. Download it now and start thinking about how your hospital can do things differently to protect the reputation you’ve worked so hard to build.

One Hour in Nurse Shoes

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Two weeks back, I had a great opportunity to shadow an RN at a prominent hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. We had set up the meeting originally as a short, informal sync up, but she found some extra time in her schedule. 

She invited me to “really see” what it was like for one chaotic hour of her shift to put things in perspective. She had been with the hospital for about seven years and on this particular ICU step-down for three. The unit held 18 beds that were generally occupied during the afternoon shift. The centralized nurses’ station seemed to be the “hub of the unit.” I laced up my sneakers, and away we went!

Unfortunately, I wasn’t ready for the chaos that ensued. Right off the bat, three nurse calls went off for her three patients. We checked with the Head Unit Coordinator (HUC), and she dispatched us to three different rooms to respond to three different requests.

As soon as we ran to handle those calls, we heard an overhead page calling the nurse back to the nurses’ station to speak to a physician on the landline. By the time we arrived, the physician had to run but said to call him back. We tried three times, but no luck. It was now time to check vitals for a patient who was showing some troubling signs. During the vitals check, we heard the overhead page again.

This time, the Pharmacy was double-checking on a medication. We had a short conversation, then rushed back to the bedside. I was starting to see how flustered my clinical counterpart had become over the last 60 minutes. We had walked well over a mile in that brief period, and my feet were on fire.

Finally, we had a few minutes to sit down and debrief from the last hour. Her challenges revolved around having to run all communications through the nurse’s station. Not only that, but many nurses were resorting to using their personal smartphones to stay in contact with other clinicians via texting. She did not partake in that practice but could definitely see the benefit of being able to have a direct conversation without running up and down the hallways.

With this in mind, I shared how a unit using Voalte might operate. Having direct access to anyone in the directory and building your own customized Favorites list seemed like a dream to her. In her mind, contacting a physician was a 7- to 10-step process, depending on the day, and required the use of an intermediary. Every action required her to leave the bedside and go on a “manhunt,” as she put it, for the information she needed.

I explained how Voalte could cut down on these steps and immediately give her more time at the bedside. The presence-based directory shows at a glance who is available and who is busy. With one tap, she can send a text requesting help from another nurse or aide. And prioritized alarms can come directly to her phone with details of what her patient needs. She quickly thought of every other nurse, on every other shift, in every unit of the hospital, and was baffled why this alternative wasn’t in every hospital in the United States. With input from dedicated clinicians like her, it soon could be!

How Smartphones Can Impact HCAHPS Scores

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No patient wants to lie in bed listening to stressful, unnecessary noise. Yet ringing phones and overhead paging are common sounds in hospital hallways, despite being counterproductive to a healing environment. Question 9 on the HCAHPS survey asks patients about the noise around their room at night, and it consistently earns the lowest satisfaction scores of all survey questions.

What’s the alternative? With Voalte smartphones, clinicians can send and receive secure text messages instead of voice calls or overhead paging about 90 percent of the time. Texting is asynchronous, meaning it doesn’t require two people to be available at the same time, so it’s easy to see why clinicians prefer it as the most efficient form of communication. And when you replace 90 percent of ringing phones and overhead paging with secure text messaging, the end result is a quieter environment that’s more conducive to healing. 

Another area where smartphones have the ability to help improve HCAHPS results is response time to patient requests. Many hospitals still rely on a unit secretary sitting at a central station to relay nurse calls with a voice call to the intended nurse. Instead, the hospital can use their alarm management system to route that alert directly to the nurse’s Voalte smartphone, allowing her to respond immediately and improve response time to the patient. (See our latest white paper, “Staying Ahead of the HCAHPS Curve.”)

The large screen of a smartphone also makes it easy for caregivers to scroll through and view all their alerts, and respond accordingly based on priority. Hospitals can choose different ringtones for each type of alert to convey priority audibly. 

With no limit to the number of alerts a smartphone can hold, caregivers don’t have to clear past history and can make sure no tasks are missed. These improved nurse call workflows go a long way in boosting the number of patients who report on the HCAHPS survey that they “Always” received help as soon as they wanted.

If your healthcare organization is still relying on outdated wireless phones and pagers to communicate, now is the time to make a switch. Smartphones redefine the standards for clinical communication, and equip hospitals with the right tools to help raise HCAHPS scores and improve your overall patient experience. 

Nurse Communication Is Just the Beginning

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Leading hospitals across the country are moving away from outdated technologies and adopting smartphones as the ultimate alternative for caregiver communication. As smartphones proliferate at the point of care and beyond, more applications will emerge that offer far more than communication, not only for nurses but also for doctors, support staff and patients inside and outside the hospital. National Health IT Week is a perfect time to take a look at the value of these new technologies in a healthcare setting.

Given the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets in our personal lives, it’s easy to see how they also have the power to improve patient experience, engagement and even entertainment. The phones we carry every day are really personal computers in our pockets. They combine numerous functions – camera, calendar, voice recorder, video recorder, alarm clock, encyclopedia and much more – all in one device. Add a virtually limitless selection of medical apps, and you have a powerful resource anytime, anywhere.

With a tablet at each bedside, for example, a doctor might show a patient his or her X-rays, a 3-D anatomical drawing and a video clip for a clear picture of what’s going on. Later, the patient can look up medical jargon, research their medications and possible side effects, and even watch the latest episode of a favorite TV show. The best schoolteachers know students are more enthusiastic when they have a hands-on role in the lesson. It’s the same for adults – taking an active role in the treatment plan gives patients a sense of empowerment, and may even make them more likely to follow doctor’s orders.

Smartphones at the bedside also are valuable for patients who speak languages other than English. Nurses and doctors can call a translator or refer to one of many language translation apps, ensuring the patient not only understands what’s being said but also feels involved in the process.

Smart technologies are all about timely flow of information. So while hospitals use snail mail to send HCAHPS surveys to patients after they go home (sometimes weeks later), tablets and smartphones can be used to survey patients proactively before discharge. If an issue needs to be resolved, the care team can respond and preempt a negative patient experience. (See our latest white paper, “Staying Ahead of the HCAHPS Curve.”)

After discharge, hospitals are starting to use apps that encourage patients to record their own vital signs, such as pulse, body temperature and blood pressure. Other apps help patients keep track of follow-up appointments and let them send and receive text messages about their treatment plan.

By bridging the gap between caregivers and patients, allowing for a smooth flow of information, and empowering people to take part in their own care, smart technologies go a long way toward adding value to the entire patient experience. 

Appreciating Our Health IT Teams

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As a former CIO, I understand and appreciate the value of health IT teams. Over the years, the IT professionals I’ve worked with have been some of the most hard-working, operationally-savvy, and often under-appreciated people I’ve ever met.

As I start the next phase of my career here at Voalte, I want to take the opportunity to celebrate National Health IT Week by recognizing those who work hard behind the scenes to keep our healthcare systems running smoothly. Our IT teams have an incredible amount of knowledge about how their hospitals operate and how departments interact with each other. They need to take a “bird’s eye view” of the entire hospital or health system to connect many pieces of the infrastructure and systems that must work together. The systems they maintain touch thousands of people, yet they often are not invited to the table for important discussions, where their knowledge of “how things really work” would be an asset.

At Johns Hopkins Medicine Community Division, our IT teams worked hard every day to implement systems that augmented the hospital’s strategy in a way that was safe, reliable and least disruptive to the end users. Leadership and end users are often oblivious to the level of complexity, planning and choreography that goes into a system implementation or just maintaining daily IT operations. True health IT professionals rarely drag everyone through the “sausage making,” nor should they. As a result, many heroic efforts, creative strategies and planning go uncelebrated. The result of their work often involves avoiding a disaster, keeping systems available and safe through a critical event, or identifying a more fail-safe, cost-effective way to protect the hospital’s data.

Some days the biggest successes are not what went right but what didn’t go wrong. We seldom run up and down the halls clicking our heels and joyously announcing what DIDN’T happen today! So I’m tipping my hat to all the hard-working IT folks out there…the technicians, the clinicians, the informaticists, the systems analysts and administrators, and the health IT leadership who often celebrate some of their best work in silence….with just the comforting hum of systems running as they should.

Having been part of those health IT teams at Johns Hopkins, MedStar Health and Peninsula Regional Medical Center, I will always have immense respect for the work and the value these professionals bring to healthcare delivery. Now, I’m excited to join Voalte as Chief Operating Officer. It’s an interesting new challenge that appealed to me because Voalte is dedicated to making a real difference in healthcare. Moreover, we are doing it in an innovative way and providing a solution that clinicians want and actually enjoy using. By facilitating communication between caregivers, we hope to speed and improve the health process for patients. Through the creativity and innovative problem-solving of passionate and talented people, we will improve healthcare.

The healthcare industry is so enormous and the landscape is so complex, I believe the real transformation will come from the incremental contributions of companies like Voalte, which believe there is a better way to use technology and make it work for caregivers—not the other way around. So as we work with our customers to improve their communication and implement a new solution, we will work with the health IT teams to make this happen. As we reflect on the value of health IT this week, my “shout out” is to them for their hard work and contributions. My hat is off to all of you!

Why Is It So Quiet?

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As a Project Manager, I spend a lot of time in our customer hospitals before, during and after they go live with Voalte smartphones. Every hospital is different, but many of their communication challenges and concerns are the same.

One universal goal is to provide patients with the best possible experience during their hospital stay. Overwhelmingly, clinicians who switch to Voalte smartphones are impressed by the reduction in noise and how quickly they can respond to patient needs – two factors that are closely tied to patient satisfaction.

After every go-live, the clinical team inevitably comments on how quiet their hospital has become. At Sarasota Memorial Health Care System in Florida, it wasn’t only the nurses who commented on the reduced noise. The day after one unit went live with Voalte smartphones, patients were asking nurses, “Is anyone here today?” And, “What happened? Why is it so quiet?” What happened is nurses are replacing phone calls with quick, efficient and quiet text messages.

Another major benefit revolves around nurse response time. In many of today’s hospitals, units are designed in a way that doesn’t provide a line of sight for nurses to see a call light outside the patient’s room. When the nurse call system requires every call to go through a Unit Secretary before being routed to a nurse’s legacy phone, valuable time can be lost. This is especially true if the nurse is busy with another patient and unable to pick up the Unit Secretary’s call. 

Using a Voalte smartphone, nurse calls don’t have to be triaged by the Unit Secretary. This means the nurse can receive an alarm or alert on their Voalte smartphone with the patient’s room number in seconds rather than minutes. The nurse can either go to the patient’s room immediately or send a text message to request backup. Some hospital systems even allow the nurse to call back to a pillow speaker to ask what the patient needs. The patient receives an immediate response and is assured that someone is on the way. And when it comes to patient safety and preventing falls, every minute is critical. 

Once clinicians are up and running with their Voalte smartphones, they really start to depend on them. They love sending and receiving text messages for quick and efficient communication, and they rely on timely nurse calls that let them respond to patients quickly. Voalte smartphones are now used in more than 30 hospitals across the country. While our customers range from major medical centers to community hospitals, every one of them has the same reason for adopting the best possible communication technology: To provide the best possible patient care.

For more on how smartphones can help improve patient experience at your hospital, see our new white paper, “Staying Ahead of the HCAHPS Curve.” 

When Seconds Count…

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I recently had the opportunity to attend my first Voalte “go-live” at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware. On an early weekday morning, I entered the hospital excited and a little bit nervous to see how the Emergency Department staff would respond to their Voalte smartphones.

I had a vested interest to ensure the transition went smoothly. You see, for me this is no ordinary hospital. Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Children’s Hospital is a just a short drive from my home, and where my children might be transported in the event of serious illness or injury. This is the hospital that provided critical care to the children of friends, preventing a neighbor’s son from losing his leg after a serious accident and treating cancer in another’s three-year-old daughter. This is a hospital where miracles happen.

I arrived at the facility during shift change as the staff was carefully checking out their smartphones and logging in to the Voalte system. Most seemed excited to embrace this new communication tool, and with a few quick tutorials they were off and running. A few clinicians were a bit reluctant, but with some hands-on assistance they were onboard in no time.

The Heath Unit Coordinator was especially enthusiastic. Using her desktop computer, she was thrilled with the ability to send text messages to mobile caregivers instead of using overhead pages or making phone calls. She took it upon herself to send practice texts to caregivers throughout the department, laughing as each responded with a quick text back.

It wasn’t long before other hospital departments were “dropping by” to check out the Voalte smartphones and ask how long it would be until they were rolled out on their units.

When I asked a few clinicians why they were so eager to move to smartphones, the standard response was that their legacy communication tools broke easily and did not enable texting. Several employees expressed frustration with the voice recognition technology built into their legacy devices and the inability to recognize complex names.

As I had hoped, the response to the Voalte smartphones was overwhelmingly positive. I was pleasantly surprised how rapidly the hospital staff adapted. With many clinicians using smartphones in their daily lives, it was an easy learning curve for most of the staff.  Nurses quickly figured out how to set up their personal profiles, adjust settings and add important contacts to their Favorites list. 

As a Voalte employee, I left the hospital proud to be working for such a dynamic company. It was a privilege to witness what can happen when you open up lines of communication and break down barriers that impede clinicians from providing optimal care. In the event of a medical crisis, I take comfort in knowing that when seconds count, Voalte will be there for my kids.

Making Tough Choices Easier

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I’ve been traveling a lot lately. Over the past month I’ve visited customers in several states, and last week I accompanied one of our Account Reps to a Georgia hospital that is facing some tough decisions about their clinical communication system.

Every hospital and every IT department I meet with has unique needs and challenges, but I also see some striking similarities in the issues many of them are trying to resolve. The team I met in Georgia is using legacy phones that are near their end-of-life. Many hospitals are facing a similar situation as they weigh how to replace traditional phones, pagers and other outdated communication systems.

None of these decisions are quick or easy, and they all involve lots of people from different departments to make the best decision for the entire facility. For the past five years, Voalte has been helping dozens of large and small hospitals throughout the country upgrade to a smartphone alternative. During that time, we’ve learned the best practices for making the switch as smooth and efficient as possible.

Most important is starting with a thorough evaluation of your technical infrastructure. Before you start passing out smartphones to your hospital staff, you need to assess your Wi-Fi network and PBX phone system, and reevaluate your alarm workflow. You also need to plan for the deployment and physical management of your smartphones and ancillary equipment, such as charging units, external batteries and protective cases.

At Voalte, we do a lot more than develop communication apps. We also offer a full range of services that spans your initial Wi-Fi assessment and technical setup through day-to-day troubleshooting and user support. After all, today’s smartphones are much more than communication devices. They are ultra-mobile computers that fit in a caregiver’s pocket, run a variety of medical applications, and will soon connect with electronic medical records and bar code medication administration systems. To get the biggest return on your investment, you need a full-service partner like Voalte.

This week we published an Essential Smartphone Strategy Kit that can help your IT department identify the critical components of an effective smartphone strategy. You can watch a webinar that provides insight from a hospital CIO, read a white paper on the best way to implement a smooth integration, and review a case study focusing on one hospital’s success. Even better, you can pass the Kit along to your IT staff and send it to your CIO to bring your entire team up to speed quickly.

If you’re facing tough decisions about an outdated clinical communication system, take the time to understand your options and plan for a complete solution. And if you want a personal consultation, give us a call. We’d be happy to add you to our travel schedule.

Healthcare and Technology: We Grow Together

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In the wake of massive industry change, the healthcare space is fertile ground for new technologies. The challenge is, innovative companies with groundbreaking ideas often have a hard time raising start-up capital, attracting development partners and gaining the traction they need to succeed.

Fortunately, we’re seeing exciting opportunities open up thanks to digital health incubators and innovation centers that are dedicated to fostering new growth. Only about one in 10 technology companies have a real chance at success. The trick is finding the one with the most potential, and providing the funds and resources it needs to succeed. Once that starts happening on a broader scale, we’ll see a whole new generation of Googles, Facebooks and Yahoos in health IT.

Rock Health is a San Francisco incubator funding the next generation of healthcare technologies. The company sets some lofty goals. On its website, Rock Health says, “We want to solve the biggest problems in healthcare. We want ideas that can reduce system costs by 50%, eliminate medical errors (all of them), cure or prevent diseases, make every one of us a doctor, cut the time it takes to bring a new therapy (digital or molecule) to market in half, and measure and report quality on a second-by-second basis.”

On the other coast, BluePrint is a New York-based accelerator dedicated to pairing talented young entrepreneurs with experienced venture capitalists. Here are just a few examples of companies BluePrint has helped get off the ground:

Luminate Health gives patients digital access to lab results, with easy-to-read reports and personalized engagement tools. 
AidIn develops an online system to manage discharge planning, coordination and billing with nursing agencies.
IntelligentM, which, like Voalte, is based in Sarasota, Florida, created an electronic bracelet that tracks hand washing among health workers so hospitals can improve hygiene and control the spread of infections.

At Voalte, we established a foothold in the industry based on the strong relationships we formed in our early years. Sarasota Memorial, Cedars-Sinai, University of Iowa, Texas Children’s, Massachusetts General, and other early adopters and development partners were crucial to our success. They gave us access to their clinicians and facilities. They let us pilot new technologies. They collaborated with us on how to integrate the smartphone functionality we all use in our personal lives with the secure, controlled, technological infrastructure of a hospital. They even let us fail, and instead of giving up on solving the tough problems, kept working with us to build better solutions.

As Voalte celebrates our fifth anniversary this month, the healthcare communication space is more exciting than ever. The major EMR vendors are embracing smartphones. Leading hospitals are opening innovation centers to test new technologies for physician communication, patient engagement, and advanced functions like bar coded medication administration.

Healthcare and technology go hand-in-hand. To bring about great change, it takes more than a great product. It also takes forward-thinking organizations coming together and growing together.

Getting to Know You

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At Voalte we do a lot more than build effective communication tools for hospital clinicians. We also provide the long-term service and support necessary to make sure our customers get the most value from their smartphone investment. Starting with our customized end-user training, we build long-term relationships with clinicians in every Voalte hospital.

After a hospital chooses Voalte, our Training Specialists are usually the first “pink pants people” to meet the clinical staff. As part of our top-notch Services team, Voalte Training Specialists are responsible for end-user and super-user training in a classroom setting prior to go-live. They have exhaustive knowledge of how our products function and are well-versed in talking through various clinical workflows. They also have an infectious enthusiasm for sharing the benefits that improved communication brings to each unit in every hospital.

That positive attitude goes a long way when we’re training nurses who may have never used a smartphone, or are resistant to changing their traditional ways of working. After all, any tool is only as good as the team that’s using it. If a hospital has 10 people on a shift and only eight are using their Voalte smartphones, you’re still going to have communication breakdowns. Our training sessions get everyone up to speed, providing a safe place for nurses to practice sending texts and receiving alerts before their actions can impact a real patient’s care.

It’s also where our Training Specialists, nurses and their managers troubleshoot the system before it’s live. Sometimes we find minor issues with the Directory, for example, such as two similar units that should be listed together. Working with the Project Management teams at Voalte and the hospital, these minor adjustments can be made before the go-live day.

We also work in advance with Project Management to customize every training session to each hospital’s unique workflow and needs. In fact, it’s often the Training Specialists who pull together the hospital’s IT and clinical teams to collaborate on the best way to get everyone up and running. By the end of most training classes, the staff inevitably tells us how much they enjoyed the class, how comfortable they feel with the user-friendly Voalte One app, and how confident they are going out on their unit and starting to use it right away.

This week, Project Manager Kelly Van Vleet and I are preparing for a trip to Alaska to meet our newest customers at Samuel Simmonds Memorial Hospital. Barrow is the northernmost city in the United States, and Samuel Simmonds is the first hospital in Alaska to choose Voalte smartphones as its communication alternative. With a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility, the staff has had to learn how to use a lot of new technology recently. On our first trip we’ll be doing a pre-training session to present them with a high-level view of how Voalte One works, give the staff a sense of what they can expect when they switch to smartphones, and identify the specific workflow issues we need to address. We’ll go back again later in November to conduct custom, hands-on training classes just before their new system goes live.

Our Training Specialists are always eager to meet the people who depend on Voalte smartphones to do their jobs every day. This trip is especially exciting as we prepare to leave sunny southwest Florida for a place so far north we’ll see more hours of darkness than light. We may need to pack some fur-lined pink pants for this project. 

Our Professional Responsibility

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As President of the Nebraska Nurses Association, I challenge nurses to strive for excellence. According to the American Nursing Association’s Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice, a professional nurse must excel at both practice and professional performance in the nursing role. 

Practice is simple to understand. For every position, we start as novices in knowledge, skills and ability. By taking advantage of resources, we strive to become experts as soon as possible because our patients and care team members deserve and expect our best. Professional performance, which includes ethics, communication, care coordination, collaboration, education and leadership, can easily be misunderstood or compromised. Busy nurses need to resist the temptation to act in a manner that negatively affects their professional status and customer trust. This can include seemingly harmless actions, such as:

- Texting protected health information (PHI) on an unapproved device.
- Discussing PHI with people not directly related to patient care (an easy mistake when using a hands-free voice badge).
- Sharing a badge number or computer login because it is one of those shifts when everyone is busy. 

It’s really about doing the right thing even when no one is watching, and understanding accountability, responsibility and autonomy. 

Just as we know not to leave valuables in sight in a locked vehicle, we should also avoid tempting people to act inappropriately in a healthcare setting. By providing the necessary structures and processes, we can support nurses to perform in an ethical and trustworthy manner. Don’t make the environment cumbersome or the resources so inadequate that nurses become tempted to take inappropriate shortcuts just to provide safe care. Communication is behind the majority of sentinel events or near misses. And I’d wager that, in most cases, the caregiver knew what he or she needed to do, but the environment or situation prevented him or her from taking the appropriate path or action. 

HIPPA violations are a big deal, to the tune of $50,000 or more per incident! Hospital executives, including the Chief Nursing Officer, are obligated to provide the right tools and environment to keep nurses out of trouble.

See our latest white paper, “5 Steps to HIPAA-Compliant Texting,” for the best practices hospitals can use to protect patient information.

Clinicians Hold the Key

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Many hospitals are facing difficult choices about how to help caregivers communicate more efficiently and how existing systems will tie in with future technologies. One thing we know for sure: Keeping your clinical team engaged in the process of choosing and implementing a new mobile communication strategy is key.

When integrating smartphones with your current workflow, a few crucial elements can help you accomplish your goals. Download our Hospital Communication Success Kit today to walk through the most important steps:

1. Evaluate your current clinical communication system. Our Clinical Communication Evaluation is a quick way to get started.
2. Identify metrics for success. Our white paper lists “3 Steps to a Smooth Smartphone Integration.”
3. Watch out for roadblocks and understand the costs involved. Our infographic points out the high cost of poor communication.
4. Learn from other hospitals. Our case study on St. Joseph Mercy Oakland shows how nurses saved time and steps by solving their communication challenges.

Voalte is the only company to provide leading hospitals with a complete smartphone alternative. If you're ready to get started, give one of our sales professionals a call today at 877-VOALTE1 (862-5831). We look forward to hearing from you.

Making Secure Connections

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It’s no secret HIPAA violations are costly. The recent upswing in fines and penalties leveled by Health & Human Services only increases the financial repercussions for healthcare organizations. Yet every day, caregivers are sending patients’ protected health information (PHI) via unsecured text, all in the interest of providing the best care as quickly as possible.

Beyond financial concerns, what’s driving the conversation about secure text to the surface is the consumerization of IT in the workplace. Technology advancements in our personal lives have made it easy to pay bills, check email, get driving directions, find information and keep in touch – all using the power of a smartphone. When caregivers can do all this in their personal lives, it’s tough to accept a legacy phone with limited functions at work. When they have an urgent need to communicate quickly with care team members and keep systems moving, it’s only natural they would be tempted to use personal smartphones to send unsecure text messages, despite the obvious HIPAA violations.

That’s where the value proposition of Voalte comes in.

Our shared device model is critical inside the hospital, where PHI is encrypted and sent over a secure network. Hospital IT departments can manage security and grant permissions, keeping sensitive information away from unauthorized users.

Moving forward, Voalte is combining the shared device model with a BYOD application for caregivers outside the hospital. Healthcare systems will be able to deploy a secure app for personal smartphones that’s based on the same directory used by shared devices inside the hospital. Rather than creating another silo of data, our strategy will align with electronic medical record systems. The result will be caregivers who can reach the right person with the right information at the right time, no matter where they are.

When it comes to secure communication, texting is just the beginning. Once nurses and doctors can connect with the entire care team and access their patients’ latest medical records, they will move quickly beyond text to photos, video and other types of media that facilitate the transfer of knowledge. We may be in the infancy stage of what secure communication means to the healthcare industry, but we’re moving toward the day when all caregivers will use a common platform to exchange information and still meet HIPAA requirements.

See our latest white paper, “5 Steps to HIPAA-Compliant Texting,” for the best practices hospitals can use to protect patient information.

One Step at a Time

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The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research (TIRR), part of Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston, recently replaced an outdated communication system with Voalte smartphones. You may have seen TIRR in the news a couple years ago as the facility where Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords recuperated after being shot by an assailant. Known worldwide for excellence in the research and treatment of traumatic brain injury, stroke, spinal cord injury and other neurological disorders, caregivers at the hospital were still relying on pagers, landlines and overhead paging to track down people and information.

With nine acute care hospitals, a children’s hospital and a women’s hospital in addition to the rehab facility, Memorial Hermann is committed to upgrading communication across the entire health system. Working with Chief Information Officer David Bradshaw, we developed a pilot program at TIRR to replace pagers, legacy phones and overhead paging with 70 Voalte smartphones. By testing a relatively small pilot with nurses in one facility, Memorial Hermann laid the groundwork for further expansion system-wide. Using a phased approach, we can learn what works well at one facility, and rely on that knowledge to roll out a smartphone communication platform at the other hospitals.

A large healthcare system presents a challenging environment for implementing any new technology. Part of the Voalte value proposition is that we take the time to do a thorough assessment of our customers’ existing Wi-Fi, PBX, middleware and other systems to be sure we can integrate seamlessly, one step at a time. (See our case study, “Quiet, Efficient Text Messages Replace Landlines and Overhead Paging.”)

Memorial Hermann is a great example of how a large health system can successfully integrate new technology into its core infrastructure using a phased approach. I appreciate their trust in Voalte, and look forward to working with this healthcare industry leader as a development partner in the future. Every day, more than 30,000 caregivers at 34 hospitals around the country are using Voalte smartphones. All of us here at Voalte are thankful for your belief in the power of our communication alternative, and grateful to play a part in transforming healthcare technology in a way that benefits caregivers and patients. Happy Thanksgiving!

To Your Health, From Our Voalte Family

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“I’m thankful that I’m a mammal.” 
Don Fletcher, Chief Scientist

We’re a pretty lucky bunch here at Voalte. We work at a dynamic young company that’s making a difference. We live and work in beautiful Sarasota, Florida, only minutes from one of the best beaches in the country. We work hard, but we also take time to share milestones from our different stages of life: celebrating news of engagements, weddings and babies; sharing stories about our children; and sympathizing with the struggles of caring for elderly parents. 

As I walked around the office this week, I stopped my co-workers as they snuck a snack from the kitchen or brewed an afternoon cup of Cuban coffee. I interrupted a few meetings, too, and even poked my head in on Trey Lauderdale in the middle of a conference call. It’s Thanksgiving, after all, and the perfect time to ask: “What are you thankful for?”

Not surprisingly, family was a common theme:

“My family and good friends.”
Lisa Jones, Sales Operations Manager

“My wife and my dog.”
Brian Hall, Senior Network Engineer

“My darling wife.”
Britton Payne, Server Developer

“My family and my boyfriend.”
Ashley Suchoval, Account Manager

“My niece and nephew.”
Grant Sheehan, Server Support Engineer

“My family and my health.”
Trey Lauderdale, Founder and President

“For the close relationship I have with my mom and dad.”
Taryn Cooley, Account Manager

As for me, of course my two kids are at the top of my list, and the fact that they are healthy and relatively happy most days is something I try to never take for granted. Many of us are also thankful to have the opportunity to come here to work every morning. From David, who started at Voalte just last week, to Alex, who’s been here since 2010, to Kenda, who is enjoying her first Florida winter after a recent move from Maryland, they are all thankful:

“That I got a job at Voalte.”
David Clarke, Server Support Engineer

“For Voalte. For family.”
Alex Brown, Strategic Partner Manager

“For my job working with a passionate team that pursues excellence in everything they do.”
Brandon Clem, Account Manager 

“For a great opportunity, meeting lots of awesome people and warm weather.”
Kenda West, Chief Operating Officer

“For the wonderful women I work with, who I look up to and who support me.”
Kimberly Pearson, Accounting Clerk

We have some level-headed folks here at Voalte and others who are deep thinkers. With only a moment’s thought they told me they were thankful:

“That I know how to change a flat tire.”
Chad Robbins, Account Manager

“That I’ve had an intriguing life, been lots of places and done lots of things. I’ve come close to death on the deck of an aircraft carrier, but also got to fly Navy planes and have the most exciting time of my life.”
Jim Bass, QA Automation Engineer 

“For my mobility. I’m thankful I can move around and do stuff, unlike a lot of people who have difficulty getting around.”
Rachel Eichen, Clinical Trainer

“For a second chance.”
Joanne Capinski, Quality Systems Manager

“For paid time off at Christmas.”
Kendall Kravec, BFF

And my favorite answer to the question, “What are you thankful for?” came from one of my favorite people here at Voalte:

“Everything. Every day.”
Peggy Thistle, Sales Administrative Assistant

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Voalte! We wish you – and everyone you are thankful for – a happy holiday.


The Magic of Bringing People Together

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When everyone works together, the possibilities seem endless. That’s why we’re all about teamwork here at Voalte, dedicated to connecting the right caregivers with the right information, at the right place and the right time.

We were fortunate to experience some amazing possibilities this year as we formed important partnerships with industry leaders and developed valuable relationships with customer hospitals. The accomplishments of the past year would not have been possible without our close collaboration with all of you.

As 2013 comes to a close, we want to wish our customers, partners and the caregivers who use our products every day a happy holiday season. Please enjoy this special message from the Voalte family! 


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