Location – Unit/Department

Vocera supports hospital locations at the unit/department level. The list of meaningful units/departments is specific to a facility and additional consideration must be given for multi-facility health systems as duplicate patient locations can exist across different facilities.

Vocera uses the patient location elements in the PV1 segment to identify location. Specifically, PV1_3 (Assigned Patient Location) and PV1_6 (Prior Patient Location). The identifiable unit information must be present within the 3 components of patient location ‘point of care’, ‘room’, and ‘bed’.

Proper identification of patient event locations is critical for proper retracing of patient movement as well as consistent performance analytics. Locations that are used for transfers, both internal facility as well as inpatient-to-outpatient and back, are also important for purposes of proper patient visit demarcation.

Per HL7 recommendations in cases of multi-facility health systems, we require the use of ‘facility’, the optional forth component of the patient location element to uniquely identify the healthcare facility containing the patient location.