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Mobile Health Care II: Medical Facilities Go Hands-Free

A number of other medical institutions have experiences that bear great similarities to the wireless efficiency evident at Vassar Center. Dramatic results in the Johns Hopkins Children’s Medical and Surgical Center were observed. This involved the clinical test bed that was intended for a Bluetooth technology scheme that would allow members of the nursing staff to go mobile. Equipped with such units, nurses could move about with a great deal more freedom and rely on voice commands to stay in touch with one another. While the Vassar facility’s brand of medical tech gadgetry employed cordless phone units, the John Hopkins Children’s Medical and Surgical Center mobilized headsets in turn for its own.

This time, the cordless system was conceived, executed and installed by Avaya Labs. The system is called Mobile Access to Converged Communications Systems (MACCS). It employs hands-free headsets that come along with an intelligent voice agent able to help the user to find, as well as connect with, other members of the staff who are at different locations within the facility.

Used on a floor that serves toddlers and school-age children, MACCS provided the 32 nurses and other staff members with the capacity to page or call a medical service desk. The operation was simple and merely required staff members to say the department name or job function, for example “Page Ortho” or “Call charge nurse,” into a headset.

“The voice command interacting with the phone and pager system was smart enough to know who the resident on call was and then connect to the phone or pager of that person to summon help,” Lehmann stated.

And since the headsets are lightweight, staff members are not compelled to suffer aches in their ear lobes any time soon. In addition, the voice-recognition technology significantly reduced the time it took in order to set up pages and calls. It also did away with the time needed to answer the phones at central nursing stations. Lehmann approximates that each nurse saved between three and 11 hours on a weekly basis.

Considering that a total of 3,460 outgoing calls as well as pages occur in a six-week period, one observes that the nursing staff saved full days of staff time. This was manifested in one nurse in particular who saved 19 hours along with another one was able to save up 68 hours. Lehmann explained that the savings allowed the staff members greater time in interacting with hospital patients, family members and other caregivers.