Touched by an iPod

They tried pagers. They tried cell phones. Now, something a little more hip.

Employees of Interpreter Services at UNC Hospitals are using the iPod touch to receive work requests and communicate among themselves.

Thanks to the upgrade, they’re saving money and increasing efficiency in the process.

“From day one, it’s been awesome,” said lead interpreter Juan Reyes-Alonso, who helped initiate the dispatch system switch from cell phones to iPod touches.

When Reyes-Alonso first started working at UNC Hospitals seven years ago, interpreter requests were dealt with through pagers.

“The pager system created a lot of issues,” said Shane Rogers, director of Interpreter Services at UNC Hospitals. These issues included an inability to prioritize cases and multiple interpreters responding to one call.

“It had gotten to the point where there was almost in-fighting,” Rogers said.

Next came cell phones.

“It was better, but the thing is that cell phone signals are not so great sometimes, and service tended to be unreliable,” Reyes-Alonso said.

The new dispatch system using online requests and the iPod touch has helped make Interpreter Services more efficient.

“It’s helping our staff to manage interpreter requests, and it allows our doctors to prioritize more easily,” Rogers said.

UNC Hospitals employ about 26 interpreters who process more than 65,000 requests per year to facilitate communication between Spanish-speaking patients and hospital employees.

“With the iPod touch, we’re using the campus Wi-Fi network instead of cell phone networks, so money is being saved because we aren’t paying for cell phone coverage,” said Hans Wynholds, the CEO of ServiceHub Corporation.

ServiceHub is the software company that helped UNC Hospitals switch from pagers to cell phones, and has now made it possible to move to the iPod touch.

The hospitals are renting each iPod for $15 a month for two years.

“We’re now saving $10 a month per device compared to when we used cell phones,” Rogers said.

Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas has made a similar switch. Boston Medical Center and Duke University Hospital are also considering the switch, Wynholds said.



Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.