West Penn Hospital, part of Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Health Network (AHN), is using Voalte smartphones to help monitor and care for premature and critically ill infants in its Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), including a new, $23 million, all-private bed expansion.
Voalte Platform will be featured at Booth 2287 as well as in the Interoperability Showcase, exhibit hall meetups and an educational session at the 2019 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition, February 11 to 15 in Orlando.
Hospitals are embracing smartphones as a solution to minimize problems caused by communication failures, delays, and errors, which contribute to 50%–80% of the most serious and harmful patient events. One survey of nurse managers and IT decision-makers found that, within the next four years, 97% of nurses will use mobile devices at the bedside.
Since the Voalte Platform rollout in 2015, only 11 percent of respiratory therapists per day now miss an order by 30 minutes – nearly 10 times fewer than before, and this metric includes those patients that refuse a treatment.
Candice Friestad led the charge when Avera first made the switch in 2014 from Motorola alphanumeric pagers to smartphones and agreed to sign a contract with Voalte, a growing medical technology company out of Sarasota, Florida.
Clinical communication has advanced far beyond the secure texting capabilities of those first smartphones. But what exactly do hospitals want from their mobile communication solutions?
