Vocera announces new app to improve communications in healthcare

Vocera Communications, a player in clinical communication and workflow solutions, has announced the release of Vocera Vina, the company’s new smartphone application. The customisable communication app presents prioritised patient-centric calls, secure messages, and alerts in a unified inbox, and provides an intuitive user experience for clinicians inside and outside the hospital. Powered by the Vocera Platform, Vina delivers relevant context about clinical events, patient status, and clinician availability, helping care teams improve safety, quality of care, and experience for patients and care teams.

“In the busy and unpredictable environment of a hospital, physicians and nurses must connect quickly with each other and with patient information to deliver safe, compassionate and effective care,” said David Augsburger, Director, Clinical Informatics at Major Health Partners. “Vocera Vina has the essential functionality needed to move all our clinicians to one platform for all clinical communication and collaboration, which will help them connect with the right people, make informed decisions, prioritise actions, and respond rapidly to emerging situations.”

To help clinicians stay focused on what matters most, Vina presents incoming communication in order of importance, along with context that provides a meaningful picture of the patient situation. Drawing from a dynamic master directory and intelligent workflow engine of the Vocera Platform, the app delivers secure messaging, voice calling, and prioritised clinical alert and alarm notifications to the right clinician or care team.

Contextual patient information like vital signs, fall risk scores, lab values, nurse-call information, and critical data like sepsis risk indicators can be automatically attached to a message or incoming call notification. The entire care team can see the full history of calls, messages, alerts, and alarms pertaining to a patient or event within a single conversational thread, and clinicians can easily see when others are busy or unavailable and should not be interrupted. They also can reach colleagues simply by saying a name, role or group.

“Building better healthcare technology means understanding a day in the life of a clinician,” said Brent Lang, President and CEO of Vocera. “Vina is the only smartphone app that care teams need for simple and secure communication. In fast-paced, chaotic healthcare environments, the intuitive user experience helps make the lives of doctors and nurses much easier and mitigates cognitive load, which impacts quality of care, safety and the well-being of patients and clinicians.”