The most common finds are:

Duplicate Users: Whether the duplicates are found in the Users Section or the Global Address Book or in ANY Alternate Names, they have to be eliminated. The Genie can’t know which one to contact. And the Genie could be trying to contact one user and report that they are not logged in when they actually are (but it’s the other name).

Nested Departments: It’s a bad practice to have one department nested within another. This can have a negative effect on calling “First name in Department”.

Groups With No Forwarding: If no forwarding number is designated for a group a call will just die if nobody answers their badge. Setting up a forwarding number ensures that a caller reaches SOMEONE that can point them in the right direction. At the very least “Record a Greeting” for the Group to give further directions (i.e. call a certain pager)

Groups With No Members: Other than Dynamic Groups and special circumstances there’s no point to having empty groups in the database. Cleaning up is always good for voice recognition.

Recording a greeting was the perfect solution for this. Just issue the command “Record a Greeting” and you can record a message that will be played when you are unreachable (i.e. “I’m currently at lunch and will return at 1pm”). The caller will then be given the opportunity to leave a message.

To Remove your greeting, issue the command “Erase Greeting”.
To Hear your greeting, issue the command “Playback Greeting”.

The T1000 Vocera Phone adds to the innovative Vocera Communications System platform as a truly shareable WiFi phone. Rather than being designated for a specific user, the T1000 Vocera Phone is dynamically assigned when a user logs in for their shift. Each time a user logs into the Vocera System with the T1000 Vocera Phone, a phone number associated with the user’s profile will be assigned to that T1000, allowing each device to be shared across a number of users and shifts. All voicemail and text messages are delivered to the user, not the device.

Whether a user prefers the hands-free, wearable Vocera Communications Badge or the T1000 Vocera Phone design, all features and benefits of the Vocera Communications System are available. Operating over a facility’s 802.11b/g wireless network, the T1000 Vocera Phone seamlessly leverages the capabilities of the Vocera Communications System and features a dedicated Vocera call button, allowing users to use all of Vocera’s innovative voice command functionalities, including call by name, call by group, and broadcast. In addition, users can dial using the phone keypad. The T1000 Vocera Phone ensures network and device security thanks to a full security suite that includes WPA-2 security protocol. To ensure call clarity and reception, the T1000 supports WiFi Multimedia (WMM), an industry standard for Voice Quality of Service (QoS) that prioritizes voice packets over an 802.11b/g wireless network.

As with the recently introduced Vocera B2000 Communications Badge, the T1000 Vocera Phone’s outer surfaces incorporate the BioCote® antimicrobial agent that inhibits the growth of bacteria, fungi, and mold on the surface.

Download the Vocera T1000 (Phone) Datasheet

For more information about the T1000 Vocera Phone call TPC Healthcare @ 888.427.2215, or visit us on the web @ www.tpchealthcare.com.

Dymo and P-touch labels do the job quite well. Consider making the labels with enough tape to wrap around the badge and into the battery area. This way the edges are under the battery and are less likely to curl up and contribute to the labels falling off.

It’s also a good idea to write the label info next to the bar code on the badge label using a fine-tip permanent marker. That way if the outside label does come off, you can find the info under the battery.

• Vocera repair kit
• Goo Gone (or similar adhesive remover/cleaner)
• Napkins/tissues for applying the Goo Gone
• Paper clip or tweezers for removing pieces of broken battery clip from the grooves
• Super glue in case of broken plastic
• A couple of toothpicks - for applying glue
• Fine-point permanent marker (for writing the badge label info next to the bar code under the battery)
• Pencil eraser (for removing the aforementioned handwritten label if necessary)

Today’s post is the first in a series about two customers who chose to take Vocera away from the “haves,” and give it instead to the “have nots” who really needed it.

Here’s the back story: Like many hospitals, one of our long-standing customers deployed Vocera in three separate phases, each time trying to balance the amount of money they had to spend with the impact the Vocera devices would make on the user groups involved. This particular customer is a 200-bed community hospital, and while they are not afraid to spend money for qualitative or business efficiency reasons, stretching their dollars to get the best results is very important.

Their VP of Support Services, who has presided over their deployments from the beginning, reminded me recently that early on management made the decision to never force anyone to use Vocera. And with people lining up at his door asking for Vocera (and having limited amounts of money to spend on new devices or licenses), he is not afraid to shake things up to ensure their investment will have the most impact.

For Phase III of the project, the customer rolled out Vocera to the hospital’s Med/Surg units. This spring, a year after that deployment, they made the decision to pull the devices back from the users who were only sporadically using the system.

By all accounts the Phase III initiative had marginal results. That’s in large part because Vocera didn’t mesh well with how those floors took care of business.

Add in the fact that their wireless infrastructure is a bit spotty in places (and no dollars to really improve that significantly), and you can begin to see where this is going. You have a user group that is not especially inclined to use instant communications (read, “they don’t want to be found”), who have a litany of excuses for not using the system (“my calls sometimes drop”).

So on May 1st, a group of devices that had previously been in the hands of Med/Surg were moved over to the previous “have nots” in Maternal Child Health (Maternity, Labor & Delivery, and Pediatrics). The good news? Immediate happy campers, and, better yet, immediate positive business impact, as evidenced by this email we received:

“I returned today to see that all my staff were wearing their Voceras. My Nursery RN told me she was thrilled because on the weekend there was an emergency and they were called via Vocera and quickly responded to the call saving time and, of course, the baby.”

Of course this doesn’t just apply to Vocera. The hospital technology landscape is littered with lots of useful applications that are collecting dust. And as this simple story shows, reallocation can have an immediate impact.

Watch this space for the second part of this series, which tells how another hospital’s Anesthesiology Vocera badges are now being used by its Maternal Child Health department.

Kenny Schiff (www.tpchealthcare.com) is founder and President of TPC Healthcare, a specialty provider of wireless communications, alarm messaging/workflow products, and services to healthcare customers.

As a Rauland insider told me a year ago (full disclosure, I worked for Rauland from 1993 through the end of 1999), the new Rauland nursecall platform (shown for the first time at HIMSS 2008 in Orlando) would try very hard to not require Emergin (or anything else) for connectivity on the wireless voice side. In the war of who controls staff assignment, their preference was/is to remain master of their universe.

It appears that Rauland has indeed managed to get their ‘no middleware’ solution working with Ascom. Not sure how the messaging protocol is being handled, but the most significant part of the equation is the SIP to SIP connectivity for voice callbacks to the room. A patient triggering a bed side alert/alarm would be presented to an assigned caregiver on an Ascom device. Should the staff member choose to respond to the patient, they would be connected from their wireless voice device directly to the nursecall patient station in the room. This type of solution has been available in some shape or form for more than 10 years; the problem is that because of limitations on the telephony connectivity of legacy nursecall platforms, it doesn’t work very well.

I did manage to spend a little bit of time at the Rauland booth at HIMSS, and an old friend (and former colleague of mine), was quite proud to demonstrate the lightening fast connection back to the room time on an Ascom i75 handset (it worked great). I had previously spent considerable time with him dealing with several different Vocera and Spectralink integration projects where callback timing and trunking issues were causing serious customer dissatisfaction.

So why am I sharing this?

With the big time nursecall players all finally moving into the native IP realm, I think that it’s very important that those on the wireless voice/messaging side, proactively deal with the interconnect aspects effectively. Clearly Ascom and Rauland have made a big leap here.

The sheer amount of legacy non-enterprise nursecall gear out there that is nowhere close to end of life, is likely to limit the impact of this change in short-term. But life is changing in the hospital enterprise, and with the walls breaking down regarding who owns these respective technologies, savvy buyers will demand interoperability and integration not just work, but work well. This is going to require shifts by the nursecall providers and the wireless voice players.

I’m not sure that the players in the wireless voice space strategically pay much attention to the fact that nursecall sales drive wireless voice sales. Probably no marketing research figures behind this (because it’s still relatively cottage), but if you look at Spectralink, Cisco and Ascom in HC (and previously Nortel and Avaya), tens of thousands of voice handsets were/are purchased as part of these types of solutions. I suspect we’ll see continued demand for better integrated nursecall-handset solutions. As the nursecall vendors begin to provide the integration, it may mean that the hospitals that are looking to integrate other patient monitoring devices will need additional middleware software. So buyer beware in the ever changing world of middleware.

Kenny Schiff (www.tpchealthcare.com) is founder and President of TPC Healthcare, a specialty provider of wireless communications, alarm messaging/workflow products, and services to healthcare customers.

TPC Healthcare, which resells both Vocera and Austco products, and has been successfully integrating EasyTouch with Vocera, welcomes the announcement and looks forward to continuing to provide its healthcare customers with innovative, best-in-class communication and workflow solutions.

The following are some basic asset tips for minimizing the number of Vocera devices that walk:

1. Use visual queues
• Label the badges with a unit identifier
• Color code badges in areas with multiple units in a department. Vocera now offers 10 different options for badge covers (Translucent White, Black, Purple, Dark Blue, Pink, Green, Yellow, Aqua, Violet, Orange, Red)
2. Prepare each unit (department) for badge storage
• Identify the best location for devices – is there a locked area?
3. Provide padded, locked return boxes at exit points
4. Enforce the use of attachments
• Prevents the pocketing of badges; eventually they would wind up at home or in the laundry