Vocada’s Breakthrough Messaging System Eliminates Communication Gaps for Both Radiologists and Hospitals
DALLAS, TX – (BUSINESS WIRE)-January 27th, 2003 – Vocada, Inc. announced today the general availability of its patent-pending messaging system that enables healthcare professionals to communicate patient information in a manner that complies with HIPAA and adheres to the American College of Radiology communication standards. By using VoiceLink™, radiologists and healthcare institutions can dramatically strengthen their communication with referring physicians resulting in eliminating communication gaps that frequently exist and pose a whole set of issues unfavorable to both radiologists, hospitals, and patients.
Failure to communicate has been cited as a causative factor in 80% of all malpractice claims1. Today, physicians are being asked to do more with less, discovering that it is difficult to meet ACR guidelines and comply with impending HIPAA standards with existing tools. Vocada has developed a solution that enables radiologists to communicate patient findings to referring physicians in a simple, elegant manner with virtually no training required.
Today's radiologists are increasingly burdened with the need to conduct more studies, hindering their time to effectively communicate with referring physicians. This invariably leads to increased malpractice risk. HIPAA will soon require documentation of all verbal communiqués. Without VoiceLink radiologists can expect to only further intensify these issues. This combination is creating a crushing legal and administrative burden to the radiology community that is adversely impacting its productivity. Wrapped into one simple and practical solution, VoiceLink fully resolves these heretofore-conflicting issues.
"Everyday, radiologists are asked to do more with less," added Peter White, CEO of Vocada. "VoiceLink is the ideal solution to dramatically simplify the patient communication process while at the same time meeting the critical requirements to document and archive medical communications. For the first time, radiologists can meet compliance standards and actually gain productivity in the process."
VoiceLink works the way physicians work. After the radiologist completes a patient study, he simply picks up the phone, dials his own Vocada-assigned 800 number, speaks the name of the referring physician, leaves a preliminary message regarding the patient, and then hangs up. VoiceLink takes over from there. The message is automatically dissected and routed to the referring physician. Messages are delivered directly to any combination of cell phones, land phones, pagers, and fax. By delivering messages to the appropriate device patient communications are radically streamlined with the elimination of disruptive interruptions and unproductive telephone tag. But the VoiceLink benefits do not stop there. VoiceLink also documents the entire communication cycle, and archives the communications in accordance with the risk management policies and preferences of the specialist, practice group, and/or hospital, along with completely satisfying HIPAA mandates. Practice managers and other administrative staff are able to generate reports from VoiceLink to identify how well their communications processes are performing. In addition, VoiceLink provides a sophisticated message tracking capability, monitoring all communiqués and alerting the radiologists if the referring physicians do not access their messages in a timely manner, thereby triggering predetermined automatic escalation rules. Additionally, all communiqués are archived indefinitely, providing full retrieval-on-demand functionality.
Vocada is available on a national basis beginning today. For additional information about how your practice can benefit from VoiceLink contact Vocada at sales@vocada.com or 214-219-5240.
MEDIA CONTACT: Vocada, Inc.
Thomas White, 214-219-5240 or thomas@vocada.com
1 Dr. Leonard Berlin MD: Malpractice Issues in Radiology: Communicating Findings in Radiologic Examinations: Whither Goes The Radiologist? AJR page 178:809 April 2002.