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Cisco Nurse Connect is a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) solution for both the traditional healthcare and long-term care (LTC) environments. The solution improves the communication between the patient or resident and the assigned care provider. By deploying Cisco Nurse Connect, the daily workflow of the nursing staff is greatly enhanced-resulting in less time wasted and improvements in overall care. This is accomplished by the direct integration of Telelocator Alphanumeric Protocol (TAP)-based Rauland Responder IV nurse call system to the Cisco Unified Communications platform and Cisco Unified Mobility through the Radianta's Beacon Alert Manager running within the Cisco Unified Application Environment (CUAE).

With this solution, hospital caregivers can improve care and increase patient satisfaction, as well as reduce the overall cost of care. Hospital patients can request nursing assistance from their bedside and obtain immediate audio communication with their assigned caregiver. Without Nurse Connect, long delays and the fragmentation of clinical workflows are typically encountered resulting in additional inquiries by the staff or patient.

For residents of LTC facilities, requests for assistance can be automatically directed to the care provider assigned to the resident. Two-way audio as well as video communications can be established between the care provider and resident within the privacy of their apartment. Optionally, the video-based communication can be extended to on-call physicians who might be located at another LTC facility or possibly a separate office.

The Nurse Connect solution is an extension to existing TAP-based nurse call systems from vendors such as Rauland. The solution builds upon the Unified Communication framework already present in many healthcare organizations. For those hospitals or LTC facilities that do not have a Unified Communication system deployed, the solution solidifies the need to upgrade from legacy dial-tone only communication systems to a truly modern and extensible Unified Communication solution from Cisco.

In other cases, Nurse Connect can also be integrated to a legacy communication system, providing many of the benefits without the need of a forklift upgrade of the entire phone system. In all cases, the underlying architecture uses Cisco network architectures for various places in the network (PIN) that include the traditional campus, branch, and data center network architectures. In addition, the solution uses the Cisco Unified Mobility architecture through the use of Voice over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN) technologies.