Solving Mobile Device Madness: Pager Replacement With Smartphones

Hi everyone,

Customer feedback is something we love here at Amcom. We’re always talking about how customer suggestions help us develop new products. Our newest technology, Amcom Mobile Connect, is proof of just that. We’d been hearing bits and pieces for some time about “mobile device madness” and how our healthcare customers were seeing a growing variety of devices within their facility.

Over the past year, we’ve held series of regional user conferences. These events have given us the chance to have one-on-one and small-group conversations with customers, usually discussing the challenges they face every day and how we might help. At our kickoff event in New York last year, we heard several attendees tell us about requests from physicians and other staff who wanted to send page messages to their smartphones, rather than having to carry both a pager and their phone. This was an increasingly common complaint. They were tired of the “tool belt” of devices.

We heard this same thing echoed at the next user conference in Atlanta. And then again in Chicago, Dallas, Palo Alto, and St. Louis. Paired with the mobile device madness we’d been hearing about outside of these conferences, we realized this was a trend where Amcom could have an impact.

We decided to delve deeper with our customers. Who exactly were making these requests? Were they looking to move away from pagers completely or implement a strategy to use pagers along with smartphones and other devices? What types of confirmations were required? What smartphones were their teams carrying, and which were supported by IT?

Armed with this great feedback, we devoted significant R&D dollars to design, develop, and test an application to solve this burgeoning issue. Once we had something built, we got more input from a customer focus group and ultimately beta tested at three major hospitals.

The result was Amcom Mobile Connect (AMC), an application which enables critical messaging to physicians and staff members carrying smartphones such as the BlackBerry and Android.

For the hundreds of hospitals currently using an Amcom operator console, Web-based directory or other application, AMC fits right into their existing environment to serve as the endpoint for page messages instead of traditional pagers. Message input for operators and Web users is exactly the same as it ever was.

For those not running an Amcom system, the application comes with a browser-based input module.

Our customers also requested full traceability for these messages, as well as the ability for message recipients to input a free-form text response. Done and done. When a message arrives to the Mobile Connect smartphone client, a delivery receipt is sent back to the sender, and a read receipt will be returned once that message has been opened. Recipients can actively acknowledge the message, which is then also transmitted back to the sender. In addition to acknowledgement, users can respond to a message using free-form text, which is tied with the original message in system log files for continuity purposes.

Meanwhile the sender can track all of this through the web portal or console product from which they originally sent the message.

We’re thrilled with the way our customers have responded to AMC. While first available for BlackBerry smartphone users, we’re now offering the system for Android users and are looking to beta test this in the coming weeks.

The other interesting thing we hadn’t anticipated was that although a lot of hospitals eventually see themselves completely replacing pagers, the reality is that this isn’t practical now. They need to use pagers and other in-house devices alongside the increasing use of smartphones in a phased approach. This fits perfectly with our philosophy and our ability to support messaging to so many different devices. This allows each hospital to implement its unique strategy at their own pace. It’s not our way or the highway!

We’d love to hear your feedback by commenting below on the blog. How have smartphones affected your organization? Is pager replacement a hot topic?