Healthcare professionals often find themselves relying on several different pieces of communication gear to stay in contact and get through the day. Hospitals and clinics often employ pagers, cell phones, PDAs, VoIP house phones and other devices to satisfy communication requirements. Beyond the physical burden of ensuring that each device is fully charged and operable, this situation makes it necessary to monitor and respond to several different communication channels during the day. Maintaining and responding to several communication channels can create confusion and indecision in hospital workers as well as increase the number of IT headaches within the organization.

This paper addresses how communication and IT issues can often be resolved by adopting a single communication device with converged functionality.