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.