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Hospital staff communicates on the go with Wi-Fi devices

By Jon Fortt
Knight Ridder Newspapers

	VICTOR JOSE COBO / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS Clinical manager Chris Tarver speaks to one of her nurses through a wireless pendant that hangs around her neck at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif. The pendants speed up the time it takes to reach other personnel to coordinate patient care.
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Chris Tarver is in the middle of a conversation when her necklace asks whether she can take a call.

Tarver, leader of the fifth-floor nursing unit at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif., supervises one of the hospital's most hectic areas. So she speaks into the vial-shaped Vocera wireless badge around her neck and says she can, and excuses herself from the room.

Even basic tasks in patient care can require approval from someone else, and finding fellow medical professionals — especially doctors — used to be a time-consuming exercise for the nurses at the 426-bed hospital. They had to find who was on duty, page that person and wait for a call back.

Cellphones interfere with the hospital's heart monitors, so historically, nurses have relied on pagers.

But since April, there has been a faster and cheaper way to communicate, using data networks and Wi-Fi technology similar to the equipment millions of people have installed at home to connect computers together.

The badges from Cupertino, Calif.-based Vocera Communications use the hospital's existing Wi-Fi network. With help from Vocera's Windows 2000-based server software, hospital workers can use voice recognition to place a call to any other badge user on the campus. If the people needed are away from the hospital, secretaries can page them.

Vocera began selling the badges and software a year ago, and its other customers include Dartmouth College, St. Agnes HealthCare in Baltimore, and retailer Target.

Vocera's real pitch isn't the badges, though — it's the software that completes the voice-recognition calls. Vocera sells the badges for $350 each, and more than one person uses each one.

The company makes its real money by selling server software — for which customers typically pay $35,000 for 75 users, not including the costs of the server itself — and by setting up the wireless network it uses.

Vocera is not alone in its quest to blend Wi-Fi and phone calls. SpectraLink and Symbol Technologies are working on ways to improve the quality of such calls, and Cisco Systems, a Vocera investor, has shown a Wi-Fi phone that works with its back-end equipment.

Mark Zielazinski, El Camino's chief information officer, said the hospital's main goal was to reduce the time it takes for a doctor to find a nurse in response to a page. That time has been reduced by about eight minutes.

"If you just did a financial straight-on comparison to other devices ... it's a huge win," Zielazinski said. The hospital considered other systems that cost 60 percent more.

That's not to say that the project has been easy or cheap. El Camino is known for embracing the latest technology. In 1971, it was the first hospital in the world to implement a computer system doctors could use to minimize prescription errors.

The Vocera project is just part of a larger $8 million-a-year, 10-year contract with Eclipsys, a technology service provider that specializes in hospitals.

El Camino also has worked to prevent a security breach, a nightmare scenario for a facility that handles sensitive patient records. El Camino's wireless network is protected by both Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol and a virtual private network.

Zielazinski said that since the Vocera system wasn't designed for that level of protection, engineers from Cisco, Eclipsys and Vocera needed an extra 30 or 40 days to get it working.

Vocera CEO Julie Shimer said business is healthy. Vocera recently sold a 600-user license to Gottlieb Memorial Hospital in Illinois, and the company closed an $11 million fourth round of funding in August; Cisco and Intel were among the earlier investors.

Shimer said the company is being careful about how it expands. She's eyeing hotels and manufacturers as possible customers to pursue next year, and she expects the business to start generating cash in the fourth quarter of next year.

The Vocera system still has a few hang-ups. It can have trouble handling some accents. Nurses at El Camino said some people with South Asian or Filipino accents sometimes can't get the system to work without training it first.

Also the system is only as good as the coverage of the hospital's Wi-Fi network, and there are still some blank spots. Secretaries are eager for the Vocera system to be tied into the paging network, so they don't have to play switchboard when doctors call in.

"I think it gives us more time with the patients," said nursing assistant Chris White. "The patients? They like it. They think it's like 'Star Trek.' "

Since the technology has gotten positive reviews from the nursing staff, the hospital plans to expand its use.

"It's been one of the smoother pilots we've been involved in. Our intent is to go housewide," Zielazinski said.

"It's a really interesting thing. When something succeeds, you get people calling you. I've got folks from radiology calling me, asking when they're getting it. You can measure success pretty easily in those cases."

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company