As Heard on National Public Radio

We’ve blogged a lot this year about smartphone usage in healthcare. It’s an evolving communications platform that more and more hospitals are using in daily care delivery and it has even attracted the attention of National Public Radio (NPR). This week, NPR highlighted this topic in their Morning Edition segment Are Pagers Obsolete? and we are pleased to be a part of the story.

Despite their decline in most other sectors, pagers remain an important piece of healthcare communications with an estimated 90% of hospitals in the country using paging systems. Traditional pagers are simple to use and typically transmit data not sensitive enough to require encryption.

With smartphones, hospitals need data encryption to be HIPAA and HITECH compliant because of the nature of patient information being transmitted among staff. As opposed to pagers, smartphones offer faster communications by eliminating call-backs and with the right communications platform they can also provide invaluable message tracking for audits. Brian Edds, Amcom Director of Product Management, also noted in the NPR podcast, “Doctors don’t want to carry a pager anymore. They want to carry their iPhone or their Android device.”

We see continued demand for both devices and anticipate that paging systems and encrypted smartphone communications will co-exist in the healthcare space for the foreseeable future. As always, your thoughts are welcome.