Direct Calling Overview

Advantages

The advantages of care team connect:

Enables seamless patient-to-nurse communication.
Enables patients to communicate with the care team in the absence of a nurse call system.
Reduces the need to don and doff Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and improve the patient experience.
Allows easy implementation by extending Wi-Fi to a new facility more quickly than bedside wiring.

Capabilities

The following capabilities are enabled by default:

Placing a call
Controlling Volume
LED indication for call in progress

Default Behaviors

The following are the default behaviors for the Smartbadge:

Black screen display and User Interface―Turned off to save power.
Touch screen―Disabled and does not respond.
DND button―Disabled to prevent the user from accidentally applying DND and rejecting incoming calls.
Panic button―Disabled to prevent the user from accidentally pressing the Panic button.

Note: Only the DND button is applicable for B-series Badges.

There is no change in behavior for the B3000n badge, and the following behavior still exists:

DND button―Places the user in DND mode. An inbound caller is offered the option to breakthrough.
Call button―Places a call to the target destination. If the badge user has accidentally enabled DND, pressing the Call button will turn off DND.
Panic Call―Double tapping the Call button attempts to initiate a Panic call if a Panic group is configured.

Enabling and Disabling Direct Calling on V5000 Smartbadge

The care team connect feature on V5000 Smartbadge can be enabled using one of the following:

Badge Configuration Utility―You can enable direct calling on multiple devices by setting the custom badge property V5.DirectCallEnabled = True. The default value of this property is False.
Best Practice: Set the Hotword badge property V5.EnableHotword to False.
VCB Menu―You can enable direct calling on specific devices by using the VCB Menu Direct Calling Enable>True.

For more information, refer to Vocera Device Configuration Guide.

Note: When the custom property V5.DirectCallEnabled = True is enabled, any user that logs into the Vocera V5000 Smartbadge are set to this mode. Ensure that only those devices intended for this use case are configured with this custom property.

B3000n Badges do not need this property. You can place a direct call to a patient if the Direct Call and a destination are set in the user profile in the Voice Server or Vocera Platform.

Note: Ensure that your administrator has enabled the direct call feature on Voice Server Console and Vocera Platform.