Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston, MA) has made a major commitment to computer telephony. Using the Visual Voice applications generator from Stylus Innovation (Cambridge, MA), it has implemented five voice-processing applications. According to technology planner Pashe Roberts, the hospital environment, with its small departments, creates the need for many small-scale voice-processing applications.
The five applications at Brigham and Women's cover a variety of functions and areas. One lets nurses call in and report a specific environmental problem and its location. With another one, expectant mothers can register for childbirth classes. A third application aids the hospital's telecommunications tec
hnicians. They can test the quality of a phone line by calling into the system and recording a message; the system calls them back, and they can listen to their message. The fourth application lets a centralized monitor provide audible information, via telephone, about the operational status of the client/server network. With the latest application, HMO subscribers can verify referral numbers.
One big reason the hospital selected Visual Voice was that Visual Basic was already used extensively within the hospital. The hospital had developed a special Visual Basic driver to tap into one of its primary database systems, one written in MUMPS.
The hospital plans to add new telephony applications. Among the projects it will undertake are desktop telephony using TAPI (telephony API), plus text-to-speech and speech-recognition systems.
Calling Dr. Blue
