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.