Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) is a 509-bed, full-service teaching hospital located in Portland, Oregon.This facility is the state’s only health and research university.It is Portland’s largest, and Oregon’s fourth largest employer with over 11,500 employees.They experience over 175,700 patient visits per year.The fundamental purpose of OHSU is to improve the well-being of people in Oregon and beyond.
Mission: OHSU, as a teaching hospital, prides itself on implementing and using the latest technology currently available.One of the areas of concentration was to improve the communications between the nursing staff themselves and their patients.With this in mind, the challenge was to apply these ideas in their next project-The Peter O. Kohler Pavilion.This new patient tower, completed in June 2006, is 335,000 sq ft, 11 stories and currently includes 86 medical, patient and ICU beds.
The Answer: Responder IV with Vocera Voice Recognition Technology OHSU is the first in the greater Portland, Oregon area to implement the integration between Nurse Call and voice recognition technology.This cutting edge implementation took the combined talents of Integrated Systems Group, Vocera, Emergin Technologies and Rauland-Borg to make it happen. The nursing staff is notified of a patient call by an alert tone on the Vocera badge, which displays call information on a LCD screen.With the text-to-speech feature activated, the system will announce Room Number, Bed Number and Call Priority and ask if the caregiver would like to be connected to the patient room.A simple “yes” connects the call directly to the Responder IV patient station. This integration with the hands free device leads to improved patient care, often answering a patient call while on the way to, or taking care of, other duties. Caregivers have the ability to communicate with each other or contact groups by name, title or function as well.In addition, they can call to/from the badge through the PBX to other phones inside or outside of the facility.
Vocera
Erik McCarty-ISG Project Manager
Results:
·Smoother Communication, faster and more efficient workflow across groups and to patients
·Time savings
·Improved Risk Management through audit trails (Management Reporting)
