Six Things Hospitals Need to Know About Replacing Pagers With Smartphones

Paging: The End of an Era

Pagers have been an vital portion of for a long time due to their capacity to offer reliable communications at a low expense. When pagers emerged on the healthcare scene, they fundamentally altered the way physicians, nurses, and administrators could be notified that a crucial message or anxious patient awaited them. Carrying a pager or "beeper" became a status symbol. Then slowly, the technologies started to offer you new capabilities, such as two-way material exchange. All through, pagers ensured message delivery in accordance with sector needs. In most situations, they promised a expense-reliable answer and featured onsite and wide-area possibilities so the appropriate people could be reached at all times. Life was beneficial.

But then the ugly truth began to emerge. IT teams saw escalating costs due to the need to have for backup equipment. They wasted hours configuring devices and trying to verify no matter whether messages were sent and received when physicians reported they did not see a particular communication. The lack of an audit trail for messages led to accountability problems. Pagers were assigned to folks but never applied (or lost), consuming away at thin hospital IT budgets for unnecessary gear and services.

And then there was the aging infrastructure: on life support themselves that started to have questionable reliability and failures. Repairs led to extended downtime as IT teams struggled to repair old gear. Also, coverage for wide-location pagers started to go downhill as paging companies' retired towers in concert with shrinking revenues. A lot of consumers began crossing their fingers and living with decreased efficiency.
Going forward, pagers will nonetheless have a location in hospital communications. But there is now a far better resolution that permits a massive percentage of the user population of medical doctors, nurses, and administrators to consolidate to a single device. In truth, probabilities are beneficial that these devices are currently 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 really like them. Medical students receive them upon entry to school. Even 10-year-olds carry them about. They are superphones, merging the energy of a cell phone with the capabilities of computers.

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

Users in hospitals are passionate about these devices and now request all communications, including 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 countless hospitals appear to be leading a grassroots campaign to ubiquitously adopt smartphones, IT teams have legitimate issues. With so a number of brands of phones and service providers, how can protocols and devices be managed? What about reliability of message delivery?