6 Reasons Why Smartphones Beat Pagers for Clinical Communication
01.17.18 Ross Menia | Industry Insights
Even in the age of smartphones, augmented reality and flying drones, a startling number of pagers are standardized as a means of communication in hospitals and health centers throughout the United States.
Recent advancements in mobile technology and the adoption of smartphones for use in our daily lives have changed entire industries for the better, especially healthcare. Here’s how your typical hospital pager stacks up against clinical communication platforms like TigerText:
- Communication Method
Perhaps the most obvious difference between these devices is the way they allow care teams to interact. Mobile clinical communication solutions allow for two-way communication and group collaboration. Pagers are strictly one-way, inevitably forcing the message receiver to introduce an additional communication tool just to correspond with the sender. - Features
Clinical communication platforms offer robust features that improve care team workflows. These include role-based scheduling automation, click-to-call, priority messaging and escalation, group messaging, secure attachments and ‘message anyone’ for those without TigerText. Pagers, on the other hand, are severely limited in their capabilities. For decades, they have proven to be a reliable way to reach out to staff members, but they haven’t evolved enough in that time to include features required by a modern care team. - Security
Even though pagers don’t necessarily contain protected health information (PHI), they still pose a security risk to health facilities because transmission from pager to pager is not encrypted. Not to mention that pagers are not HIPAA compliant for various reasons. TigerText is a fully encrypted, end-to-end secure texting solution that is HITRUST certified and HIPAA compliant. So you can rest easy knowing that your private messages remain private. - Price
The average cost of a single pager is $9.19 per month per user. That could mean $200,000 or more spent on pagers alone for large health organizations. Compared to clinical communication tools, pagers can cost 45% more, and at the same time lower your ROI and limit your care team’s efficiency. - Ease of use
For most people smartphones are already a part of daily life, so the transition to using them at work is seamless. Even though pagers are as simple as it gets and have just a few buttons, the overall process of using a pager within a care team quickly becomes a burden to all. - Data Analytics
TigerText offers powerful data analytics that can be leveraged to track adoption and usage trends to help customers achieve game-changing ROI for their facility. By collecting data and establishing benchmarks among the industry’s top performing organizations, our success managers develop a comparative scorecard that gives customers a way to identify opportunities for improvement by role and department. You simply can’t get that from pager systems.
It’s no wonder health care facilities are actively replacing their pagers with mobile clinical communication solutions. To learn more about TigerText and how it can benefit your care team, visit www.tigertext.com.
Originally published at www.tigertext.com on January 17, 2018.
