Evaluating Vocera Alternatives

In the healthcare industry, there are often patient situations that require time-sensitive response to ensure the patient’s well-being. To address these emergencies effectively, care teams need a robust clinical communication plan that guarantees prompt action. This involves implementing a reliable communication and collaboration solution that enables doctors to securely exchange patient information and other sensitive data. With the growing number of tools on the market, teams must meticulously assess their choices for a successful plan. 

Vocera is a clinical communication and collaboration tool used by care providers throughout the industry. They offer both a phone application and wearable communication badge for healthcare teams looking to improve communications. 

In this blog, we will analyze the follow tools to set your care team up for a successful decision-making process:

• • Vocera
  • OnPage
  • American Messaging
  • TigerConnect
  • Spok

Vocera

Before discussing Vocera alternatives, it is only fair to discuss its clinical communication and collaboration solution and identify why users may be seeking a replacement. 

The Vocera system is designed for healthcare systems to improve their communication workflows during urgent patient events. 

Below are some of Vocera’s features:

• Care providers can connect with their team by name, role, group, or extension for streamlined communications.
• Prioritize messages to ensure that the on-call doctor is aware of the urgency of the sender’s message.
• Integrates with EHR systems to improve health system interoperability and collaboration.
• Gain visibility into audit trails that prompt the recipient to acknowledge the message.

Vocera is a clinical communication and collaboration system that is great for teams looking to swiftly communicate with each other via multiple devices. However, when looking at this solution, we found that Vocera’s digital scheduling features are not as advanced as some of the alternatives on the market. So, if your team is looking for an all-in-one clinical communication and collaboration solution this is something that they should consider before purchasing. 

OnPage

Firstly, we wanted to discuss OnPage as an alternative to Vocera. OnPage enables care teams to securely deliver critical messages to the right on-call doctor every time. With the OnPage mobile app, healthcare teams can unify fragmented, siloed communication and ensure critical events rise above the clutter to reduce readmission risks and improve patient outcomes. 

OnPage improves care team coordination by enabling providers to deliver high-quality, patient-centered care through its HIPAA-compliant messaging solution. 

Below we will share the benefits that OnPage offers in addition to the basic clinical communication and collaboration features: 

• Contextual Communication: OnPage enables the delivery of HIPAA-compliant alerts and allows providers to securely add attachments to their messages. This provides doctors with the ability to send and receive contextual messages for more informed decision-making.
• Distinguishable Alerts: Urgent alerts sent via OnPage are distinguishable from your typical mobile push notifications, ensuring that physicians are always immediately made aware of patient events. Additionally, high-priority alerts override the silent switch and Do Not Disturb, ensuring that no critical patient emergency goes unnoticed by on-call teams.
• Role-Based Alerting: Critical alerts are routed based on on-call schedules and roles to ensure that the right person is always contacted in the case of an emergency. Teams can create groups and escalation policies to further enhance the effectiveness of their on-call management and rest assured that even in the case of a missed alert, the message will automatically route to the next on-call physician in line.
• Patient-to-Provider Communications: Through Live Call Routing capabilities, patients can call a dedicated line that will immediately route them to the on-call physician. This significantly improves a patient’s care access, facilitates post-discharge patient and family engagement and enables teams to seamlessly deliver round the clock care.
• Digital On-Call Schedules: Use digital on-call schedules to create equitable on-call workloads. Based on schedule configurations, OnPage will only alert the scheduled doctor in the case of an emergency. Plus, OnPage’s scheduler ensures that in the case of a schedule misconfiguration or coverage gap, all doctors are alerted of the situation so that no patient emergency goes accidentally ignored.
• Visibility Into On-Call Schedules: Care providers can gain access to their and their team’s schedules right from the OnPage phone app. This enables more shared knowledge among team members and can support care team collaboration.
• 24/7/365 Customer Support: Gain 24/7/365 access to US-based customer support, including a live chat support on OnPage’s website.

Pricing

Let’s address the elephant in the room: pricing. The vendors discussed in this blog can’t match the value OnPage offers for the price. It’s consistently delivered cutting-edge innovations without increasing prices over the past five years. Unlike other vendors, OnPage maintains transparent pricing and subscription levels. You’ll never receive surprise invoices based on usage; what you agree to upfront is what you’ll pay. Pricing information can be found here: https://www.onpage.com/pricing/ 

Integrations

Additionally, OnPage offers powerful and customizable integrations with EHR systems, Chat Applications (Teams and Slack), and virtually any other critical health system via API, Webhooks, or email. OnPage also supports SSOs and Active Directories from several vendors in the industry. The integrations are not only continually updated to include the latest technology solutions, versions, and capabilities, but are fully supported by our technical support team as well. 

Product Development

We also want to highlight that OnPage is known for its exceptional flexibility when it comes to development requests. Unlike many vendors in the market, we prioritize customer needs and are committed to making meaningful enhancements to our product. If a customer requires a feature that significantly improves their process, we make it a priority in our development pipeline. Rest assured, your requests won’t be ignored – they are thoroughly considered in our weekly product strategy meetings. As OnPage is central to our operations, we consistently update and enhance it, rather than simply maintaining it as a revenue source.

We also frequently receive positive feedback from customers who have transitioned from solutions like Vocera, praising OnPage’s ability to integrate with practically any solution out there through webhooks, API, and email.

American Messaging

American Messaging offers a critical messaging phone application that helps care providers facilitate peer-to-peer communications during critical patient situations. One of the unique features of American Messaging is their ability to deliver messages to pagers from the smartphone app. 

As we were examining this alternative however, we did come across disgruntled user reviews expressing their frustration when it came to American Messaging’s customer support. And if your team requires integrations with other health systems you must consider this before investing in this solution, as their options are limited in comparison to the other solutions in this blog.

TigerConnect

TigerConnect is a unified platform for healthcare teams to securely collaborate and improve workflows. While this is a great solution for many organizations, that may not be the case across all organizations, considering certain contract limitations posed by TigerConnect.

Smaller organizations found it hard to scale their business up or down when using TigerConnect, forcing them to either continue with the number of licenses they currently had or face high switching costs. So, this is something for growing care teams to think about when they are investing in a clinical communication solution.

Spok

Spok is a communication technology for healthcare organizations to quickly and securely share critical information between care providers. It enables teams to deliver HIPAA-complaint messages, create and maintain on-call schedules, and direct alarms to the correct on-call doctors.

While many doctors enjoy the ease-of-use of this application, they also report experiencing technical issues. One G2 user describes how Spok can lag causing frustration to physicians and resulting in less efficient patient response times. Additionally, a recurring issue highlighted in Google Play store reviews is the app’s unreliability. Customers frequently report not receiving pages or pages failing to produce any sound, a problem that defeats the purpose of carrying a pager in the first place. So, this is something that must be considered when evaluating clinical communication and collaboration options.

Conclusion

When it comes down to it, teams must be examining internally to identify their organizational needs and goals, and purchase a tool that aligns accordingly. So, while all of these solutions offer unique features and benefits, they may be best suited for more specific use cases. Care teams should carefully consider these Vocera alternatives and choose the right fit for them.