Vocera Aims For More Intelligent Hospital Interventions

Vocera Communications’ and Extension Healthcare’s solutions blend to take pressures off clinicians in hospitals and improve their responses to patient needs. According to Brent Lang, President and CEO of Vocera Communications, the two companies partnered together on 40 customers before the acquisition. They take data from multiple sources–such as patient monitors and electronic health records–to make intelligent decisions about “when to send alarms, whom to send them to, and what information to include” so the responding nurse or doctor has the information needed to make a quick and effective intervention.

Andy OramHospitals are gradually adopting technological solutions that other parts of society got used to long ago. People are gradually moving away from setting their lights and thermostats by hand to Internet-of-Things systems that can adjust the lights and thermostats according to who is in the house. The combination of Vocera and Extension Healthcare should be able to do the same for patient care.

One simple example concerns the first scenario with which I started this article. Vocera can integrate with the hospital’s location monitoring (through devices worn by health personnel) that the system can consult to see whether the nurse is in the same room as the patient for whom the alert is generated. The system can then stop forwarding alarms about that patient to the nurse...