Vocera Reporting is a Powerful Tool to find out What’s Happening, but also What’s Happened
November 11, 2011
Often overlooked, one of the most powerful Vocera features is its Report Server (VRS). The folks back in San Jose did some smart things early on, not the least of which was to use standardized tools for collecting and managing data (MySQL), but also their user of Crystal Reports as a framework for reporting. Out of the box, with no customization, Vocera’s canned reports can tell you a lot about what’s happening. Add on the ability to schedule and email these reports and you end up having a nice set of management tools that are easy to use, with data that’s easy to understand.
Still, sometimes one needs to “investigate” more specifically… While most hospital customer have call detail reporting (CDR) for their traditional telecom appartus, Vocera’s user and role based framework offers many additional dimensions to understanding what’s happening communications wise, or sometimes more importantly, what’s happened.
This past week, a clinical manager at one of our local customers needed such investigative work in regard to a specific employee over the course of a 6 month period. I’m not privy to the reasoning, but we were told that this was very important. Given the volume of calls at this particular facility, the canned IncomingCallDetail was going to be rather unwieldy to generate and sift through, and we needed a smarter (and more easily replicatable) means of running this type of report on particular users. Using Crystal Reports, and some MySQL query know-how, we now have easily bolted onto that customer’s report server the ability to easily choose a user, a data range and find out some important questions:
- Who called them?
- What was their status when the call came in?
- Were they logged in?
- Did they reject the call?
- Did they block the call?
This was a pretty basic use case, but the larger point is that the Vocera Report Server’s extensible framework makes it easy to ask your own specific questions and easily deliver answers to them.
