New products

Voalté application integrates hospital communications

Voalté makes software called Voalté One for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and now also the iPad that integrates VoIP calls, health-grade text messaging and alarm/alert management. The name, in a cryptic sense, explains the nature of the software. Vo (voice), al (alerts) and té (text) is how the name was created. “One” underscores that everything is done on a single device. It’s pronounced “volt”, in spite of the accent. I learned all of this during a demo at the Voalté booth at HIMSS10.

Physicians and nurses can meet all of their point-of-care communication needs with a single app running on one device. This has obvious advantages over carrying around two or three different pieces of hardware running different applications. The Voalté One app lets you handle all of the types of messages mentioned above in an intuitive interface. Although it works the same on the iPhone and the Blackberry, the latter is more versatile since it multitasks. Voalté One has been written is such a way that there’s multitasking within the app on the iPhone but if you need to run a different app on the iPhone for a few minutes, you won’t be aware of alerts sent via Voalté One until you exit that app and load Voalté One again. The Blackberry allows you to continue to have access to Voalté One messaging while working in a different app.

The iPad is too large to be convenient for nurses to carry on their rounds. It niche appears to be physicians who can take advantage of the larger screen size when viewing medical images or using the EMR.

The company makes its money designing and building communications systems for hospitals and large clinics, allowing it to offer Voalté One as a free download.

An informative demo for the software running on an iPhone or BlackBerry can be viewed at www.voalte.com.

Posted March 18, 2010