Question from a Journalist: Replacing your medical pager with a smartphone.?

I'm writing an article on hospitals that are replacing pagers with a smartphone.

1. Are you part of a hospital system that decided to replace pages with smartphones? If so, what are some of the reasons why you made the switch?

2. What are the pros/cons?

3. What was the financial impact?

4.Have you met any resistance with your own hospital staff, and if so, how did you overcome it?

5. Any advice you'd like to share with other hospital systems on making this transition?

Answers

Here are some of the key learnings for our clients:

1. One device: Most physicians carry smartphones (iPhones, Blackberry, etc.) anyway. They are happy to consolidate all their communications into one device. Besides, smartphones do so much more than pagers can. They support apps that facilitate easy sharing of information and schedules. Text messages and emails facilitate fast communications.

2. Privacy: One concern physicians have is privacy. They do not like to share their smartphone numbers since they fear it will get abused and they will receive calls at the wrong time (at night), esp. when they are not on call. Our product takes care of this privacy concern. At no point in time do we display physician contact info (phone number, email address, etc.) to the end user. Lack of privacy can be a negative of smartphones, which happens to be a pro because of the uniqueness of our product.

3. Technology: Our company also has a technology called Clik2Talk, where nurses and hospital based personnel can talk to physicians directly with the click of a button without knowing their phone numbers. These calls can be received on smartphones or any landline at times physicians choose to be called instead of paged. Obviously, pagers do not facilitate such technology.


1. Adoption: As with any new technology or habit, we find that some physicians are so used to their pagers, they do not want to give them up. To facilitate this, our product works with existing pagers and paging system seamlessly.
2. Separation: Physicians like to keep their personal life separate from their professional lives. When a pager goes off, its all about work, so it facilitates that separation.
3. Urgency: Pagers signal urgency of response. This can be replicated on smartphones by special/distinct ringtones that also signify the same urgency.

Financial Impact:
Hospitals can save a ton of money by converting to smartphones. These savings come from getting rid of pagers as well as from more streamlined workflow and integration of communications.

Resistance:
I believe the benefits of EMR SYSTEMS/EHR SOFTWARE systems has opened eyes to benefits of leveraging technology in the healthcare environment, so resistance has decreased over the years.

Advice:

Since we are not a hospital, any advice may not be pertinent. However, paging is a small part of the overall communications in the hospital or electronic medical records company. Current paging systems do not integrate scheduling seamlessly and do not facilitate other forms of communication. If you look at communication as a whole, there are many benefits to be availed of when using smartphones based technology. Those benefits cannot be delivered by smartphones alone. They have to be part of an integrated communications solution.

I will be happy to discuss this with you in person or answer any further questions.