Vocera Communications System/UC Davis Medical Center

By adopting the Vocera system, UC Davis Medical Center added another element to its highly regarded patient care and another tool for its workforce to use.

Situation

The UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, California, is a teaching hospital and the only level one trauma center in a region that covers 33 counties and has more than six million residents. With 530 licensed beds and more than 30,000 admissions a year, the medical center is a nationally recognized leader in the use of advanced medical technologies to complement its top-flight medical and nursing staff. The medical center’s fast pace, high volume, and complexity of acute and critical care cases has always required the use of a variety of communication devices – phones, faxes, pagers, overhead speakers – to help staff contact each other in a hospital complex that covers nearly one million square-feet.

Solution

With its busy emergency department and operating rooms, nine intensive care areas and a variety of other specialty-nursing units, hospital officials have continually sought new ways to improve communications in order to enhance both patient care and employee effectiveness. One of the key ways of accomplishing this has been to simplify the clinician universe by reducing the number of different communication devices in use at the hospital. This is especially important for employees whose daily jobs require them to travel throughout the medical center’s many floors, wings and departments. Rather than spending valuable time responding to a pager by locating the nearest available house phone, staff can now use the Vocera Communications System to respond immediately to calls and questions.

Vocera uses small, two-ounce communications devices – clipped to a shirt or worn on a lanyard around the neck – to provide the means for making real-time contacts between staff. Employees can also use simple voice commands with Vocera, rather than physically dialing numbers, to make phone calls to people outside the hospital.

Better Health and Lower Cost

By adopting the Vocera system, UC Davis Medical Center added another element to its highly regarded patient care and another tool for its workforce to use. The first area that tested Vocera devices was the surgical unit, a floor where dozens of surgeons, nurses, technicians and other personnel deftly handle a continuous caseload of patients within its suite of 17 operating rooms.

The tiny, hands-free Vocera “badges” helped speed up communications throughout the floor by allowing Operating Room staff to simply press the call button on these wireless units and directly contact a specific person. The new system reduced the amount of time in the usual communications process, wherein someone pages a colleague or leaves a message and then waits for the callback. The hospital’s Operating Room charge nurse, for example, found that by having instant contact with her team members, she was able to more efficiently accomplish such tasks as getting an operating room prepped for another patient, ordering blood, and conferencing together doctors for surgery scheduling. In short, the new communications device helped a highly skilled UC Davis nurse better meet the constant challenges of the hospital’s busy surgical floor.

Today, less than two years after its initial introduction, nearly 3,000 employees at UC Davis Medical Center have Vocera accounts—a system which uses voice recognition technology to authenticate each employee using its automated messaging service. Five hundred employees can be logged on to Vocera at any one time, and the medical center now averages about 4,000 calls a day using the system.

Initial studies at the hospital indicate that not only are call volumes on the rise, but the amount of time required for those interactions has decreased, which means staff are able to discuss medical issues and accomplish administrative tasks more often and more efficiently.

Doctors and nurses aren’t the only users of Vocera. Other UC Davis medical center personnel, such as X-ray technicians, physical therapists and housekeeping workers, also have jobs that keep them on the move from room to room and floor to floor. Using the communicators, these key personnel can be alerted to upcoming tasks and requests while working on their current assignment. Knowing about that next patient or work location, without having workflow interrupted can save valuable time and energy for staff. One medical center employee, for example, found that using Vocera helped her trim several miles off the 6 miles she typically walked during a shift.

As part of an overall focus on patient care and health research, the embrace of new technologies is one of the reasons publications such as US News and World Report consistently rank UC Davis Medical Center among the top hospitals in the nation. The medical center’s ability to deliver high quality patient care is enhanced by new tools and technologies that help staff do their jobs even better. With its hospital workforce now using a voice-activated system to communicate more quickly and directly, UC Davis continues to be on medicine’s leading edge in the delivery of treatment and care.