Saint Barnabas Medical Center improves patient care with the Vocera Solution for Healthcare from IBM

One of the most important goals for any healthcare organization is constant improvement in quality of patient care. For hospitals like Saint Barnabas Medical Center, part of that means shortening clinical staff response time and making sure each patient gets the care he or she needs as quickly as possible. Saint Barnabas is the flagship hospital of six acute care centers in the Saint Barnabas Heath Care System, which is the largest system in New Jersey with about 22,000 total employees. As the only burn unit in the state of New Jersey, with a full range of services and nearly 40,000 inpatient discharges a year, Saint Barnabas Medical Center has a pressing need to efficiently handle its large staff’s telemetry needs as well as communication to caregivers.

One of the hospitals in the Saint Barnabas Health Care System was already using a wireless solution to cut down response times in their emergency room, so Saint Barnabas Medical Center began looking at similar solutions to improve their communication capabilities.

Saint Barnabas Medical Center’s CIO, Mike McTigue, says, “We were utilizing a walkie-talkie beeper system to notify telemetry clerks. We felt that that was too open for error, and the response and turnaround times weren’t quick enough. We needed to enhance that.”

An instant access solution
To address their goals of improved communication and faster patient care, Saint Barnabas Medical Center looked at the wireless Vocera Communications solution being used already within their system on a small scale. Because of its effectiveness, Saint Barnabas Medical Center began researching Vocera as a possible answer to their issues.

“It started with telemetry, but we said ‘this can really help us in other areas,’” says McTigue. “So we decided to integrate the solution hospital-wide, in the telemetry room, the operating room, and communication docks.”

After evaluating other providers such as Eclipsys and NEC, Saint Barnabas turned to IBM Healthcare and its wireless and mobility healthcare strategy to plan and implement the structure and installation of the Vocera solution.

“IBM’s knowledge of clinical workflows and core competency with wireless and network solutions, along with ability to execute, were the reasons the hospital chose to go with IBM,” says McTigue. “We really felt they would do absolutely whatever was necessary to make the implementation successful.”

Planning for success
The Vocera Solution for Healthcare from IBM enables instant wireless voice communication that users can control with spoken commands. Staff members are immediately connected to the people and resources they need to reach without having to leave voice messages or physically search the building.

IBM Healthcare worked closely with Vocera Communications to integrate the wireless voice system with back-end hospital management systems. IBM also assessed the wireless infrastructure before the full implementation. A full wireless survey was completed, evaluating the hospital’s wireless infrastructure and ensuring that access points and settings were where they needed to be.

IBM also offered training and client support during and after the implementation process at Saint Barnabas Medical Center, making sure staff was knowledgeable. Because the hospital is on a 24/7 schedule, IBM helped to plan the training stages and brought best practices from other facilities they had worked with to help handle human resource policies and dispersion of units.

“IBM brought to the table all the experience they had gained from hundreds of other Vocera installs across the country,” says McTigue. “They were very accessible and easy to work with.”

Cutting time and noise
“One of the things that always frustrates physicians is getting a call and then calling the nurse’s station and being put on hold, then to find that nobody actually called them,” says McTigue. “Another issue is noise. The noise of the telephone, the noise of the overhead page.” Within a few weeks of implementing the solution, the hospital began to see improved response times and users noticed a marked difference in the amount of overhead pages as staff became comfortable with using the new technology. Within eight months the hospital was fully deployed with 3,000 users, making it one of the largest deployments of Vocera in the country. Saint Barnabas also reports a cut in delays on operating room turnover, citing the ability to find a housekeeper or tech right away instead of having to leave a message or route it through another department. The medical center estimates that they will have made close to 1,000,000 calls in the first year of using the Vocera technology.

According to McTigue, the nurses and staff who use Vocera have championed the new technology to administrators and the other hospitals in the Saint Barnabas Health Care System.

“As a result of this feedback about Vocera,” says McTigue, ”I think it may become a corporate initiative as well. The nurse managers here are very happy with it. It’s nice to hear your clinicians saying this because then you really know you’ve hit your mark with what you wanted to do, and made life better for them.”

Looking forward
Saint Barnabas is currently a pilot site for testing of the new release of Vocera. McTigue says the hospital was chosen as a test site because they helped develop some of the functionality of the new release, through the research they conducted and suggestions they came up with for the enhancement of group functions. Saint Barnabas will also be a beta site for management software that will be able to integrate with the Vocera solution. The hospital is looking for new ways to enable telephone systems to call into the system, and is considering other third-party software that may be able to tie in with bed monitoring software. McTigue says they’re also thinking of ways to integrate the system with critical monitors that would alert nurses and doctors of deviations in patient vital signs, like arrhythmia on a heart monitor.

“The bottom line is, we do anything we can to help our patients,” says McTigue. “We really believe in the product and we believe it’s enhanced what we do here. We’re passionate about it.”