So, we all hate going to the doctor’s office for one reason or another, whether it’s because it’s not fun being sick, you hate needles, or it’s just a pain to take time out of your busy schedule. One of my biggest pet peeves is walking into my doctor’s office, checking in with the receptionist, filling out any necessary paperwork (which is normally about fifteen pages) and then you sit. You sit and wait for what seems like a lifetime, not knowing if you will be next or if the eight people sitting there along with you will be called back before you. No one gives you any idea of a time frame on how long you will be there. Everyone has his or her face buried in a magazine and not much conversation is had.

Well, all of that is about to change. Close your eyes and picture this. You enter through large wooden doors into a beautiful lobby area. Directly in front of you is a peaceful and serene waterfall. To your right is a big screen TV that takes up the entire wall. Right next to this is a cheerful chef making delicious chocolate chip cookies or a healthy chicken salad. A smiling face then greets you and introduces himself or herself as a member of the Life Guide team.

A Life Guide meets patients immediately upon entering the clinic and redirects them to a decentralized check-in area. This private, more intimate area allows patients to feel like their visit is one-on-one. The Life Guide helps with any paperwork and gives a brief tour of the clinic, and when the caregiver is ready, the Life Guide escorts the patient to a procedure room. No longer are patients sitting in a lobby, waiting and wondering how long it will be until they are seen by a caregiver. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?

Now open your eyes because this is the reality at one group of forward-thinking clinics. I recently went to a newly opened Mosaic Clinic in Kansas City, Missouri for a site visit, and as I was introducing new Voalte users to the solution, I kept asking myself, “What is this Life Guide position all about?” I learned that Life Guides are there to make patients feel as though they are not just numbers. Life Guides are welcoming, caring, and compassionate, and they help guide patients through the sometimes confusing and frustrating process of obtaining healthcare services. Most traditional clinics can make us feel like we’re trapped in the “hurry up and wait” game. We are checked in and paperwork is pushed through and we are left to wonder whether we will be there for ten minutes, one hour or half a day. In Kansas City, the status quo is no longer good enough. At Mosaic clinics, you, the patient, are the main priority from the moment you walk through those doors, and we all know there is no better feeling in the world than when someone makes you feel special. Inarguably, Life Guides are playing a critical role in solidly establishing Mosaic as a leader in this movement towards more comprehensive, personalized service. Nationwide clinics take note. We’re your patients, your customers, and THIS is what we want!

One of the many fun facets of my job as a Voalte clinical trainer is travel. Lots and lots of travel. Crosstown and cross-country. Short-term (I've spent less than 24 hours onsite before flying out again) and long-term (after a month in Houston, I had fallen in love with "The Big Heart," a nickname the city earned post-Katrina). When I'm not introducing new users to Voalte One, I'm kayaking outside the La Jolla sea caves, eating whole lobster in the North End (yep, wore the bib!), and watching sunkissed city kids dancing at the waterwall at Millenium Park…

On a recent long flight sans Wi-Fi and entertainment, I had time to do some thinking and I found myself in awe of how drastically working for Voalte has changed the way I perceive and experience our world. Specifically, I'm now acutely aware of our connectedness…all the different ways we choose to communicate, conduct business, and foster relationships.

Voalte is indisputably the industry leader in smartphone healthcare communications, but somewhere over New Mexico I considered that we're also still very much at the forefront of a broader movement towards more efficient interactions conveyed via increasingly sophisticated technologies. We're among the communication cowboys (and girls)! How fitting that I was thinking of this 29,000 feet over Santa Fe.

Of course, there are valid arguments against this evolution, trend, whatever you want to call it. People are concerned that we're swiftly losing the value of personal interaction and face time (the literal meaning, not the Jobs creation), and there might be something to that. Instead of exchanging a handshake when I accepted employment with Voalte, I signed and scanned a document. I emailed my enthusiasm to an office 1,248 miles away. So I get it. I empathize with a fear of the implications that pulling back from human-to-human connections might have on us. But while I waited for the flight attendant to reach my row with the beverage service, I put together an entirely different, more positive spin on technology-assisted communication.

The bottom line for me is this. All of that impersonal communication technology facilitated me finding and gaining employment with Voalte, and now when I return from my travels, I come back to smiles, and hugs, and long "catching up" conversations with coworkers that have quickly become friends. Technology isn't impersonalizing communication; it's expanding our world and allowing us access to people, places, and activities that weren't possible before. So I'm proud that we're connectivity pioneers. I'll keep viewing the world with excitement for the future, open to all the possibilities that new communication methods will bring. I've witnessed firsthand in hospitals all over the country what we have accomplished in healthcare; I can't wait to see what other industries will introduce…

“An upgrade in our XYZ system broke the integration to ABC.”

“We will need to do assignments in two places if we want that functionality.”

“Our nurses carry two pagers and a phone because the systems don’t integrate easily.”

Do any of the above sound familiar?  If so, you probably are one of the many hospitals going through the alarm management middleware selection process.

As Vice President of Innovation at Voalté, I spend a great deal of time traveling around the country talking to CIO’s, CTO’s, and Chief Nursing Officers about communication in hospitals and their alarm management strategy.  One point of constant frustration seems to keep appearing in the realm of middleware alarm notification.  This frustration was building when I first started Voalté about a year and a half ago, but recently it seems that it is starting to reach a tipping point.

The world of alarm management middleware in hospitals seemed to really take off due to Emergin and the concept of an Enterprise Service Bus leveraging a Service Oriented Architecture for alerts and notifications.  The concept of a single source to receive alarms from a number of systems, prioritize them, and dispatch them to “the right person, at the right place, at the right time” really hit home with CIO’s and others looking to integrate disparate systems into a unified alarming system

Since the acquisition of Emergin by Philips, it seems that the market has opened up to a number of companies. The three frontrunners in the market currently appear to be:

Emergin (A Philips Company)
Globestar (ConnexAll)
Comm-tech (An Amcom company)

New players, such as Intelligent Insites and Imatis, have entered the arena .  In addition to the true “middleware” companies, a great deal of the previously integrated systems are building their own point-to-point connectors with other vendors.  There are VoIP phone vendors that are creating proprietary direct connections to input systems, input systems companies building direct connections to phone vendors, and everything in between.  The end result is a group of disparate systems and integrations with no global strategy for alarms and notification.  With no open standards that have been widely adopted by input, middleware, and output companies, the confusion (and point-to-point integrations) seems to be growing.

As a service that needs to leverage these systems (its the AL in Voalté!) I am hoping things work themselves out in the next few years.  The market has been created and seems to be maturing now, so it will be interesting to see where the incumbents move things and where the new players will try to drive innovation.  Whether good or bad, it will at least be interesting to see where this world of alarm management middleware plays out in the next few years.