Baxter rolls out Voalte Linq voice-activated technology

Baxter, a global medtech company, introduced Voalte Linq, the company's first voice-activated technology, at the 2025 HIMSS Global Healthcare Conference & Exhibition. Voalte Linq is a lightweight, wearable badge powered by the Scotty assistant, a voice-activated technology aimed at better enabling effective, streamlined communications between care teams and freeing up more of their time. Voalte Linq can be integrated with available products from Baxter’s care communications suite, a subset of its connected care portfolio, including Voalte Mobile and Voalte Nurse Call.  Voalte Mobile is a set of mobile applications that communicate actionable patient information and alert directly to staff members’ smartphones to streamline care coordination. Voalte Nurse Call performs as a hospital call bell system that forwards detailed patient notifications directly to care teams.  With the addition of Voalte Linq, these tools can work in tandem to help enhance communication and activate workflows across healthcare settings with speed and accuracy.  Activated by the "Hey Scotty" voice command, Voalte Linq aims to: Reduce the strain on care teams with clear, reliable voice-activated technology, combined with a comfortable design, that enables care teams to communicate quickly. Enhance IT and operational efficiency with the ability to integrate with other Baxter solutions and help promote automated workflows utilizing assignments and directories. Support patient and staff safety with the means to initiate Voalte Nurse Call duress workflow via voice-activated technology or speed-dial a predefined number with a configurable button that could help support rapid response during critical moments. "The launch of Voalte Linq powered by Scotty assistant marks an exciting step for Baxter's connected care evolution, with the introduction of our first voice-activated technology," Donny Patel, president connected care and technical services at Baxter, said in a statement.  "As one of the first in the industry to leverage technology of this kind to drive workflow automation for hospital settings, we aim to transform how care teams communicate with one another and their patients." THE LARGER TREND In 2021, Baxter Asia Pacific rolled out an online resource portal to support patients living with chronic kidney disease in Indonesia.  The My Kidney Journey website hosts information on CKD, including symptoms, causes and stages, and the latest information on multiple treatment options to manage the disease, such as peritoneal dialysis at home, in-center dialysis care and kidney transplant.  The portal also provides patients, families and caregivers with insights on ways to live well on dialysis, such as coping with emotional difficulties of diagnosis and demands of treatment. Other companies in the voice-activation technology space include Suki, which collaborated with Google Cloud in 2024 to enhance its Suki Assistant tool using Google's Vertex AI platform.  Google's Vertex AI is a search engine that permits organizations to build their own generative AI-enabled search engines.  It allows companies to search patient data, including clinical sources, such as FHIR data and clinical notes. It also includes Med-PaLM, a generative AI technology that utilizes Google's LLMs to answer medical questions. Suki Assistant is an AI-enabled voice tool that generates notes, does dictation, suggests codes and answers clinicians' questions. The offering can be used along with EMRs to copy clinical notes into the EHR.   Canary Speech is an AI-enabled voice biomarker technology company, which was awarded a patent for the development of its paired neural networks for speech analysis aimed at advancing the field of voice biomarker technology.  The patent covers a paired neural network system to improve AI-powered speech analysis. It allows precise monitoring of subtle changes in an individual’s voice by comparing it with previous samples.