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.”