Quick Summary
The partnership between Stryker and Lone Star Communications aims to enhance communication and safety in educational institutions through the integration of Stryker's Vocera wearable mobility platform with Rauland's Telecenter U educational platform.
The Vocera solution offers voice-enabled communication and mobility, allowing teachers and staff to initiate lockdowns and emergency protocols from anywhere within the school.
Vocera’s integration with Telecenter U provides a comprehensive solution for communication, emergency response, and security in educational settings, addressing the limitations of traditional communication and life safety platforms.
The Lone Star/Stryker partnership offers a cost-effective and flexible solution that covers multiple communication needs in educational institutions, providing a one-size-fits-all approach to communication and emergency response.
The future of Vocera solutions in education involves streamlining workflows, integrating various communication modalities, and enhancing security measures to create a comprehensive fabric of protection for teachers and students.
Since its founding in 1991, Lone Star Communications has been providing life safety communications and instructional technology solutions to K-12 and higher education institutions. The company’s formula remains simple: provide innovative technologies, expert guidance, and ongoing services to meet the specific needs of the market.
This legacy of excellence led to a collaboration with Stryker to provide a unique integration between Stryker's Vocera wearable mobility platform and Lone Star's flagship educational platform, Rauland’s Telecenter U (TCU). This integration builds off of standard communications technology, and gives educators and administrators the ability to go beyond walkie-talkies and panic buttons—creating an ecosystem that handles everyday communications and allows staff to connect and notify from classrooms and elsewhere.
Partnering to protect students and teachers
Long before Alexa, Siri, or smartphones, Stryker's Vocera technology was a pioneer in the wearable speech-enabled communications space, crafting faster and more efficient ways to provide one-to-one and one-to-many communication, predominantly in the healthcare space.
With its own history of success in healthcare, Stryker acquired Vocera in 2021 and immediately saw a parallel between the Vocera solution’s ability to save patients and protect nurses and the growing safety concerns facing schools. Moving into the education space was an opportunity to protect students and teachers in critical emergency environments.
Rauland’s Telecenter U had already gone a long way toward that goal. Its IP-based, critical communications solution leveraged schools’ existing networks, infrastructure, and legacy equipment to integrate with public address, visual messaging, security and access control systems. The resulting seamless, cohesive communications solution included IP addressable classroom speakers, district-wide paging, a web-based user interface and a mobile app.
Moving beyond hardwired call buttons
Stryker’s Vocera smart badges, with their ability to leverage a school’s existing Wi-Fi infrastructure and allow seamless conversations with other badge users, was a natural fit with TCU, with which it could form a direct link. The combined Lone Star/Stryker/Vocera solution—voice, messaging, marquees, in-room fixed devices—can offer far more than the simple overhead paging found in most schools.
According to Jonathon Murphy, a technology innovation specialist at Lone Star, one of the limitations of traditional school intercom systems is that they’re hardwired—tied to a particular location such as a phone on a desk or a panic button on the wall. As a result, he explains, the teacher or staff member needs to be near one of those locations to send out an alert. But what if they’re outside on the playground, or walking down a hallway, when an emergency arises?
That’s where the mobility of Vocera’s badges comes into play. “They're not tied to any one location,” he says. “Not only that, but the ability to know the location of the end user when something happens is also part of the solution.”
Peter Kraslawsky, Stryker’s manager of Strategic Partnerships, agrees.
“There is no other solution in the market today that allows for an individual...to initiate a lockdown from wherever they are,” he says. “It's extending the power of that TCU product to the individual wearer or the individual user.”
Lone Star adds voice to the mix
But Vocera’s technology allows it to be more than simply a mobile panic button.
“The primary differentiator on a Vocera solution,” Kraslawsky acknowledges, “is, number one, that you're wearing the device. Number two, and this is really the key, it's voice. You, the teachers, the administrators, the school resource officers are able to use their voice and to let somebody know what's happening in a dangerous situation.”
To this he credits Lone Star’s lockdown integration and engineering work, which allows alarm protocols to be initiated via verbal command. And because the badges can be targeted to individuals or specific groups, they are more effective than—and avoid the intrusive chatter of— walkie-talkies.
Also unlike walkie-talkies, the badges can call back directly to in-classroom speakers if there’s no immediate response to a call button at the front desk.
“It moves beyond the capacity of the panic button or the walkie-talkie,” Kraslawsky states, “by really being this everyday solution that can be used for calling somebody by their name, calling somebody by their role, or broadcasting.”
One size fits all
To many, the most potent aspect of the Vocera platform is its ability to create an overall fabric of protection for teachers and students, anticipating any holes that might exist in the traditional communications workflow. But the Stryker/TCU combo is also a one-size fits all solution, contends Murphy, one that allows schools to save money by solving multiple problems.
“School districts are always looking for ways to save money,” he says. “When they can find a solution that covers two, three, four different problems, I think that's a win for them.” By having one vendor provide a single solution, he adds, “it gives them the flexibility they need to [both] handle emergencies and communicate on a daily basis.”
Kraslawsky cites what he calls the “four pillars” of school security—physical security, resource officers, training, and communication—and believes that communication, while often the lowest priority, is regularly the number one failure point in active shooter situations.
That’s why he sees Vocera continuing to streamline school workflows into the future. “What do those workflows need to look like?” he asks. “Who needs to get the alert and alarm notifications? Who needs to get those messages?”
“I really do think the most exciting thing about what's coming down the road for Vocera are the integrations and the types of integrations that we're doing with Lone Star,” he affirms. That means being able to integrate the many disparate pieces of communication within a school—access control, video camera, PA—and bringing them into a central hub.
“That,” he says, “has been the core business for Vocera in the healthcare space for the last twenty years. And bringing it into the education space is really exciting.”
Choose from the links below to stream the episode:
You can always watch the episode here from our YouTube Channel: The Vocera Difference: Beyond a Panic Button
Peter Kraslawsky is Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Stryker, where he leverages his extensive expertise in healthcare and educational technology and solutions to drive innovation and improve patient outcomes and school safety. With a strong background in product development and strategic management, Peter has successfully led numerous projects that enhance operational efficiency and support healthcare and euucation professionals. His dedication to excellence and passion for advancing medical and educational technology make him a valuable asset to Stryker and the healthcare and education industries.
Jonathon Murphy is a technology innovation specialist at Lone Star Communications, where he has worked since 2000, filling roles in almost every department—starting in installation, then as a service technician, and eventually in IT. As a service technician and system programmer, he gained valuable experience in building direct customer relationships, which led to a position as an education sales representative and ultimately his current role.
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