Phone Borneo

Paging: The Finish of an Era

Pagers have been an necessary component of for a extended time due to their capacity to give reliable communications at a low price. When pagers emerged on the healthcare scene, they fundamentally altered the way doctors, 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 technology began to offer new capabilities, such as two-way specifics exchange. All through, pagers ensured message delivery in accordance with industry specifications. In most cases, they promised a expense-reliable remedy and featured onsite and wide-area solutions so the ideal men and women could be reached at all instances. Life was wonderful.

But then the ugly truth began to emerge. IT teams saw escalating costs due to the want for backup gear. They wasted hours configuring devices and trying to verify no matter if messages were sent and received when doctors reported they did not see a specific communication. The lack of an audit trail for messages led to accountability challenges. Pagers were assigned to individuals but in no way made use of (or lost), eating away at thin hospital IT budgets for unnecessary equipment and services.

And then there was the aging infrastructure: on life assistance 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-area pagers started to go downhill as paging companies' retired towers in concert with shrinking revenues. A lot of individuals began crossing their fingers and living with reduced performance.
Going forward, pagers will nonetheless have a location in hospital communications. But there is now a far better answer that permits a massive percentage of the user population of physicians, nurses, and administrators to consolidate to a single device. In reality, probabilities 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 others have burst onto the communications scene with a vengeance. Physicians, nurses, and administrators appreciate them. Medical students obtain them upon entry to school. Even ten-year-olds carry them around. They are superphones, merging the power of a cell telephone with the capabilities of computers.

Unlike pagers just before them, these devices transcend social and job-connected boundaries. They are the communications device for the masses—and seemingly every physician. Even more importantly, they're everywhere.  Hospitals are no exception. According to Manhattan Research, an estimated 63 percent of physicians at present use smartphones, with that number expected to reach 81 percent by 2012.  With the unmatched capabilities of smartphones—not just in individual-to-person 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 lots of hospitals seem to be leading a grassroots campaign to ubiquitously adopt smartphones, IT teams have legitimate issues. With so lots of brands of phones and service providers, how can protocols and devices be managed? What about reliability of message delivery?