In the healthcare industry, professionals are more likely to be mobile than not: roaming from patient to patient, office to operating room, clinic to hospital. Quick access to patient information and other healthcare professionals can help hospitals and physicians improve patient care, and Sprint Nextel Corp. is testing two new speech-enabled products designed for the health care industry.
The first involves integrating the push-to-talk technology of its iDEN network with a traditionally Wi-Fi badge system from Vocera Communications Corp.; the second, which was demonstrated at a recent healthcare conference in conjunction with software vendor Meditech Inc., involves voice search for patient information.
The PTT-based service is being tested at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, to provide closer communication contact among various types of health care providers. The program basically ties in simple badges worn by hospital staff, which have typically run over a Wi-Fi network for in-building communication, into Sprint Nextel’s iDEN network to enable PTT connections and the ability to instantly contact someone outside the reach of the Wi-Fi network.
Bill Montgomery, Sprint Nextel’s national director of health care sales, said that the Vocera device provides a low-cost alternative to equipping all employees with PTT phones and serves its purpose well in-building. The Vocera service is currently used in between 300 and 350 hospitals across the country, as well as in other industries such as warehouses and grocery stores. Vocera’s executive vice president, Brent Lang, said that the technology also can be used on a CDMA2000 1x EV-DO Revision 0 or Rev. A network.
Although hospitals have not been as quick to automate and mobilize applications as other industries such as banking, the industry has adopted Wi-Fi for communications needs, Montgomery said.
“We’re well within the tipping point of health care using wide area network’s capacity as the main network for many of their applications,” Montgomery said.
Voice prompts
The carrier also is developing a service in partnership with Nuance Communications that allows physicians to use their phones for voice searches for patient records, patient status and other data, in order to access the information quickly and without needing to log into a computer or check a physical patient chart. Montgomery, who served as a hospital CIO for about 30 years, said that a doctor who crosses paths with a colleague who is treating the same patient may not have all the details of treatment and drugs on-hand, and there might not be a computer handy. So the physician could use their phone, ask for the patient information and receive it via the handset.
“We think we’ve kind of hit a radical change in using wireless devices,” said Montgomery.
Accuracy is key
The application includes a human element as well, for times when a user speaks with an accent or is in a noisy environment, Montgomery said. If the system does not understand what a care taker is requesting, the sound file is sent to a human representative, Montgomery explained. They will listen to the file, decipher what is being said and then correct the file and send it on to the system.
Accuracy is crucial when dealing with patient information, he said-which is one reason the project is still undergoing testing and is not likely to be publicly available until next year.
“We don’t need 95 percent or 90 percent or 96 percent accuracy, we need 100 percent,” said Montgomery. “We need to make sure everything comes back 100 percent.”
The correction component would simply add a few seconds onto the transaction time, he said, adding “my experience is that it comes back, and it comes back correctly.”
And the simplicity of the application deals with the obstacle that busy physicians simply don’t have time to master complex devices.
“It has proven with PDAs to be too much for most physicians even to do,” Montgomery said. “So we’ve looked for a way that we can speak into the phone and have voice action take an action.”
