Streamlining How Hospital Staffs Communicate
Voalté
Rob Campbell
Health-care IT at most hospitals is outdated. Clinicians rely on noisy overhead intercoms, bulky pagers, and scratchy cordless phones to convey crucial information. A 2009 study by the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business found that poor communication costs U.S. hospitals $12 billion a year. To help nurses work more efficiently, 3-year-old startup Voalté sells an app compatible with BlackBerrys, iPads, and iPhones that consolidates hospital alert systems with phone and text messaging. Cell phone service is notoriously bad in hospitals, so Voalté runs the system over hospital Wi-Fi. Hospitals buy the smartphones directly from manufacturers, while Voalté provides servers, software licenses, and accessories. Support staff monitors everything from call traffic to battery life from afar. Pricing varies, but CEO Rob Campbell says a hospital can get started for about $75,000. If it all seems obvious, Campbell says the best products usually are. The 30-employee, Sarasota (Fla.) company has signed up 11 hospitals, including Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, the country's largest pediatric hospital. As the manager of application software for Apple in the 1970s and founder of the company that created PowerPoint, Rob Campbell likens the rapid development of applications for smartphones to the software push driven by the personal computer. He hopes to triple revenue in 2011, from a little more than $2 million last year, and expects to be profitable by the end of 2012. Campbell’s optimism is fueled in part by new record-keeping and diagnostic apps that are pushing the smartphone to the forefront of patient care. "Clinicians are mobile people," says John Moore, a managing partner at Chilmark Research in Cambridge, Mass. His firm projects that the market for mobile health-care apps in hospitals and other institutions will hit $1.7 billion by the end of 2014. "They want information without having to log into a computer on wheels." —Patrick Clark (posted July 6, 2011)
Rob Campbell
Health-care IT at most hospitals is outdated. Clinicians rely on noisy overhead intercoms, bulky pagers, and scratchy cordless phones to convey crucial information. A 2009 study by the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business found that poor communication costs U.S. hospitals $12 billion a year. To help nurses work more efficiently, 3-year-old startup Voalté sells an app compatible with BlackBerrys, iPads, and iPhones that consolidates hospital alert systems with phone and text messaging. Cell phone service is notoriously bad in hospitals, so Voalté runs the system over hospital Wi-Fi. Hospitals buy the smartphones directly from manufacturers, while Voalté provides servers, software licenses, and accessories. Support staff monitors everything from call traffic to battery life from afar. Pricing varies, but CEO Rob Campbell says a hospital can get started for about $75,000. If it all seems obvious, Campbell says the best products usually are. The 30-employee, Sarasota (Fla.) company has signed up 11 hospitals, including Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, the country's largest pediatric hospital. As the manager of application software for Apple in the 1970s and founder of the company that created PowerPoint, Rob Campbell likens the rapid development of applications for smartphones to the software push driven by the personal computer. He hopes to triple revenue in 2011, from a little more than $2 million last year, and expects to be profitable by the end of 2012. Campbell’s optimism is fueled in part by new record-keeping and diagnostic apps that are pushing the smartphone to the forefront of patient care. "Clinicians are mobile people," says John Moore, a managing partner at Chilmark Research in Cambridge, Mass. His firm projects that the market for mobile health-care apps in hospitals and other institutions will hit $1.7 billion by the end of 2014. "They want information without having to log into a computer on wheels." —Patrick Clark (posted July 6, 2011)
