Vocera brings ‘Star Trek’ to the enterprise

If you’ve always thought the communicator badges on the original “Star Trek” TV series were cool, now you can use a device almost exactly like it. However, you’d better be comfortable around needles, because a hospital is where you’re most likely to find one.

The crew of the classic science-fiction show’s Starship Enterprise wore small devices on their chests that they could tap to communicate instantly with their colleagues. Vocera Communications Inc.’s Vocera Communications System is uncannily like those science-fiction gadgets. It uses hands-free, voice-activated devices that users can carry around their necks to talk with co-workers any time, anywhere within range of the enterprise’s Wi-Fi network.

Vocera was founded in 2000, and the badges eventually developed a following among hospitals, where nurses spend their time going from one patient’s room to another and need to communicate frequently. Most of Vocera’s customers are in the health-care field, but the Cupertino, California, company is exploring new worlds. Hotels, retail stores, shipping companies, libraries and factories are a few of the places where Vocera thinks its system could come in handy, according to Julie Shimer, president and chief executive officer.

Vocera’s system consists of the communicator devices, plus Vocera software and a Nuance Communications speech-recognition engine on a server. Using the badge, a worker can receive a call from another badge, accept or reject it, talk to the caller, and hang up without ever touching the device. A user who wants to initiate a conversation just presses a button on the badge and asks the system to call a particular person, or whoever is doing a certain job at the time, said Brent Lang, vice president of marketing at Vocera. The software finds the right person or sends the message out to team members until it finds one who can help.

The system uses VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) to send calls over the enterprise Wi-Fi network, but those calls can also be transmitted over a wide-area network between offices. In addition, Vocera can be integrated with the enterprise phone system so users can make and receive outside calls.

For nurses at the University of California, Davis, medical center, who used to spend a lot of time looking for supervisors and paging doctors, Vocera has made life easier, said Lori Dickinson-Miller, a project manager at the 580-bed facility who works with the Vocera system. It used to take 15 to 20 minutes for two people to get in touch with each other, she said. Cell phones aren’t allowed in the medical center because they operate on a frequency that can interfere with some medical equipment, she said. And a key feature of Vocera isn’t available on cell phones: Nurses need to be able to call co-workers, such as the head nurse on duty, without knowing that person’s name.

“The amount of communication has increased, but the time it takes has greatly reduced,” Dickinson-Miller said. With more information, nurses can give faster and better service, she said.

The UC Davis deployment is big: about 3,000 badges, shared among employees, Dickinson-Miller said. Users can pick up a badge, turn it on and log in, and it’s automatically associated with their personal profile, Vocera’s Lang said.

The system is now a critical tool for nurses, according to Dickinson-Miller.

“It’s amazing how comfortable people get once they have a new technology that is easy for them to use,” she said. “You can’t take it away.” When the system has to be taken down for maintenance, nurses are anxious to get it back, she said. They still have pagers as backup.

The main library for Orange County, Florida, located in Orlando, has found similar benefits, according to Marilyn Hoffman, community relations coordinator for the county library system. Librarians in the six-story building spend most of their time out on the floor assisting patrons and finding books, Hoffman said. The badges save them from having to go back and forth between bookshelves and fixed-line phones, she said. Security and custodial staff also use Vocera, with about 65 badges in use at the library today. Though standard cellular headsets can be used with the badges, the library hasn’t heard patrons complain about voices coming out of the devices’ small speakers, she said.

The Talbott Hotel, in Chicago, is now implementing Vocera along with a new Wi-Fi network and an automated dispatch application. Housekeeping, security and other employees in the boutique hotel will adopt the badges in the place of two-way radios that the Talbott has been using for years, said hotel General Manager Troy Strand. With the radios, every call went out to every radio, but with Vocera, each call can be targeted. Also, the badges are easier to use than the heavier radios, which frequently were dropped and broken, he added.

“If they’re carrying a room service tray with both hands, they can just say ‘yes’ and take the call,” Strand said.

The hotel plans to use a text-message feature, which will allow the new dispatch software to send a text message — displayed or read aloud via text-to-speech software — to employees automatically, he added.

Organizations looking to use a VOIP system like Vocera’s have to make a commitment to a ubiquitous, high-quality Wi-Fi LAN, said Bob Egan, an analyst at Tower Group, a market analysis company in Dedham, Massachusetts. That requires site surveys and ongoing work to monitor interference, which can be an expensive proposition, Egan said.

George Goodall, an analyst at The Info-Tech Research Group, in London, Ontario, thinks Vocera has potential in any business where employees spend a lot of time on their feet. A potential pitfall is the system’s dependence on speech recognition, which might not work reliably in noisy environments such as a factory floor, he said. Though Vocera is still basically alone in the market, Goodall sees established communications vendors such as Siemens AG trying to grab a piece of the action.

However, Vocera isn’t standing still. The company is looking to integrate Bluetooth for wireless headsets and including features to reduce downtime in the event of a server crash, Shimer said. The company is also busy writing APIs (application programming interfaces) so that other applications can be integrated with its system. Shimer and Lang envision users one day using Vocera to do things like verbally querying many types of databases through voice recognition, while boldly going about their jobs.