Six Things Hospitals Need to Know About Replacing Pagers With Smartphones

Paging: The Finish of an Era

Pagers have been an necessary part of for a long time due to their capacity to give reliable communications at a low price. When pagers emerged on the healthcare scene, they fundamentally changed the way physicians, nurses, and administrators could be notified that a essential message or anxious patient awaited them. Carrying a pager or "beeper" became a status symbol. Then slowly, the technologies began to give new capabilities, such as two-way information and facts exchange. Throughout, pagers ensured message delivery in accordance with sector specifications. In most situations, they promised a cost-successful resolution and featured onsite and wide-location options so the right many people could be reached at all occasions. Life was decent.

But then the ugly truth began to emerge. IT teams saw escalating costs due to the require for backup equipment. They wasted hours configuring devices and attempting to verify whether or not messages had been sent and received when medical doctors reported they did not see a distinct communication. The lack of an audit trail for messages led to accountability difficulties. Pagers were assigned to individuals but never ever applied (or lost), consuming away at thin hospital IT budgets for unnecessary equipment and services.

And then there was the aging infrastructure: on life support themselves that began to have questionable reliability and failures. Repairs led to extended downtime as IT teams struggled to repair old equipment. Also, coverage for wide-region pagers began to go downhill as paging companies' retired towers in concert with shrinking revenues. A lot of folks began crossing their fingers and living with lowered performance.
Going forward, pagers will nevertheless have a place in hospital communications. But there is now a far better solution that permits a massive percentage of the user population of medical doctors, nurses, and administrators to consolidate to a single device. In truth, chances are fantastic that these devices are already commonplace at your hospital.

Enter the Smartphone Dragon

Seemingly out of nowhere, smartphones such as the iPhone®, BlackBerry®, Android™, and other people have burst onto the communications scene with a vengeance. Physicians, nurses, and administrators adore them. Medical students get them upon entry to school. Even ten-year-olds carry them around. They're superphones, merging the power of a cell telephone with the capabilities of computers.

Unlike pagers prior to them, these devices transcend social and job-related boundaries. They are the communications device for the masses—and seemingly every physician. Additional importantly, they are everywhere.  Hospitals are no exception. According to Manhattan Analysis, an estimated 63 percent of physicians currently use smartphones, with that number expected to reach 81 percent by 2012.  With the unmatched capabilities of smartphones—not just in person-to-individual communications, but also in information retrieval for something from drug interactions to receiving EKG results—their recognition is understandable.

Users in hospitals are passionate about these devices and now request all communications, such as code calls, to be sent to their smartphone. They wish to shed their tool belt of and cell phones, preferring to simplify their lives and communications with a single, all-encompassing smartphone.  Although the clinical and administrative communities at quite a few hospitals seem to be top a grassroots campaign to ubiquitously adopt smartphones, IT teams have legitimate issues. With so countless brands of phones and service providers, how can protocols and devices be managed? What about reliability of message delivery?