COVID-19: 6 Simple Tactics for Safer, More Efficient Communication

April, 2020

We’ve organized a Vocera COVID-19 Response Task Force to define simple configurations of our technology that customers can use to make communication more efficient and potentially more effective in this pandemic. Some tactics were defined and put into production by our customers. Others come from our own ideas and experience. All begin by defining a scenario in which a customer would find themselves during these unprecedented times.

I’d like to share six of the simplest and most powerful Vocera COVID-19 response tactics here. Our service and support teams at Vocera can help you deploy the first five or do the work for you – at no cost – if you don’t have time or are not sure how.

1. Enable instant communication with the entire incident-response or infection-control team. You can configure a variety of COVID-19 response groups so users can quickly and easily call or send a message to all members of the group.
2. Allow caregivers to be notified immediately of a patient’s COVID-19 test result or when risk factors are present. You can configure your solution to allow caregivers to receive immediate notifications from your lab system or clinical surveillance system on positive or negative results. Critical lab values and patient vitals indicating COVID-19 can be sent from the EHR to clinicians.
3. Mobilize your COVID-19 leadership team. You can configure message templates to quickly communicate urgent information to your leadership group. Examples include an urgent request to join a conference call, or updates on triage area backlog.
4. Make it easy for care teams to reach people in the community outside the hospital. You can add outside numbers to your Global Address Book on the Vocera Voice server. This will allow care team members to call directly to the local department of health, surrounding hospital command center, infectious disease office, local clinics, and more – without needing to search for phone numbers or connect to a telephone.
5. Allow Vocera users outside the hospital to reach users inside or outside the hospital. In a time when more people are working outside of the hospital, you can configure your solution so users outside the hospital who are licensed for Direct Access can call a direct access number, authenticate, and use the Vocera Genie to call another Vocera user or a number in the Global Address Book on the Vocera Voice Server. This saves precious time and eliminates the need to ask an operator or unit secretary to find a person manually.
6. Enable nurses to communicate with patients in pop-up bed locations lacking nurse call. Most rooms and beds in pop-up bed locations don’t have nurse call. So, for isolation pop-up locations, a nurse must don full PPE to communicate with the patient. You can configure the Vocera Badge or Smartbadge for a solution that will reduce the need to don and doff PPE.

• Secure a Badge or Smartbadge near the head of each patient bed. Log into the device with a generic profile such as “Room 5 Bed 1.” Set the generic profile to auto-answer with no other actions permissible. When a nurse needs to speak with the patient, the nurse simply presses the Call button on his or her Badge and says, “Call Room 5 Bed 1” from anywhere outside the room. Staff can also call from a landline, or from a Vocera smartphone app or web client. The Badge or Smartbadge attached to the patient’s bed auto-answers (the patient does not have to touch the badge), and the nurse and patient can communicate quickly and safely.
• Note: If the Vocera B3000n Badge is attached to the bed, the battery will need to be swapped every 8-12 hours. If the Vocera Smartbadge is attached to the bed, it can be plugged into an external power source using a USB-C charger.
• Note: Large deployments of this response tactic could require a paid services engagement.

Please contact our technical support team or your Vocera sales representative if you need assistance configuring your Vocera solution to use capabilities you might not have turned on, expanding it beyond its current footprint, or ordering more devices or licenses.

We are developing a library of Vocera COVID-19 response tactics which we will publish soon on our COVID-19 Resource Page. I welcome you to connect with me on LinkedIn to share tactics you’ve devised to use your Vocera deployment in this crisis. We’d like to add them to our library to help as many hospital workers as possible on the front line of this pandemic communicate more safely and efficiently.