With an increase in doctors wearing the Vocera badge, I'm getting more requests for texting as a way of alerting the doctors or hospitalists of nurse questions and patient status.  Many times a doctor is busy in another patients room and will reject the call.   What I would like to see is a very locked down texting option.  We use tiered administration for a lot of users here and the limited permissions make it a very nice feature.

What I'd like to see accomplished is to give users the ability to text the Vocera badge but to limit who they can send those texts to.  I don't want to open texting up with the ability to text anyone in the system.  If I could give the nurses or unit secretaries the permission to text and limit the groups of people they could text to, I think it could be very beneficial.  If I have a group of hospitalists, I'd like the unit secretaries to only be able to only text the hospitalists.

If a text could be sent to only those hospitalists signed in, it would eliminate a lot of outdated texts to doctors that weren't working the day the text was sent out.  It would also be nice to be able to text a doctors cell phone if programmed in the system.

We don't give access out here for the Vocera User Console.  I don't want users to have access to everything that option provides.  An ideal place to locate the texting option would be the Vocera Staff Assignment software.  This application is usually left open all day on the units.  If a nurse or secretary could look at the staff assignment screen, click on the hospitalists name and text them I think it would be ideal.