The Beep Goes On

Most of my blog posts over the past few months, including this one, are focused on smartphones. Clinical smartphone communication is such a widely talked-about, read-about and thought-about topic because it is completely re-defining the beep and call-back procedure and offering providers a way to fundamentally change their workflows. On a smartphone, the alert message lets a provider know if a situation is critical, or if it can wait until their current task is completed. Smartphones offer the ability to respond immediately with an acknowledgment, a reply, or even a call to discuss information. And, the entire exchange can be tracked, providing a full audit trail.

So why isn’t everyone adopting smartphone usage at their facility? A recent article in The Globe and Mail discusses some of the implementation challenges and looks at how several hospitals are approaching these topics.

If you are curious to read more about what other facilities are up to, Amcom conducted a survey of more than 300 hospitals in June 2012 to find out how they are approaching mobility strategies. You’ll find the outcomes in both white paper and webinar formats.

I would love to hear from you, too. Is your facility piloting or implementing a smartphone program? Who gets to use them – providers only, or other staff such as nurses, transport teams, and housekeeping? What challenges are you facing and how are you overcoming them?

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.