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Are Hospital Paging Systems Sustainable into 2020?

Hospital paging systems and pager networks have been a mainstay of healthcare, hospitals and acute care clinics since the 1950s. The hospital pager is often a right of passage for most physicians. Some doctors will carry from 2 to 6 pager devices, and still have to have an ear out for overhead pages! Unfortunately, hospital paging is a source of inefficiency and error.

Your hospital paging system is already paid for, yet it is a source of considerable cost to your hospital. Time consuming "page and pray" workflows, missed pages, and delays in response contribute to delays in care, longer hospital stays and frustration among clinicians. Frustration leads to insecure workarounds such as insecure text messaging or chat apps. Worse yet, hospital paging contributes to the $12B in losses from breakdowns in hospital communication, not to mention the impact on sentinel events in hospitals.

One survey found that 14% of pages were being sent to the wrong physician, with about half of those classified as “emergency” or “urgent” pages. That could mean 4,300 misfires a year, with about 2,000 being high priority. Besides being time consuming to initiate contact, requiring nurses to log into multiple systems to look up on-call schedules, hospital pager and overhead hospital paging system lack basic oversight and auditing. How do you know a physician has received, read or responded to a page?

Telmediq_cardiologist-on-call

Telmediq offers a modern replacement for mobile pagers, code alerts and overhead paging systems, helping ensure reliable message delivery. Configurable rules allow pages to be routed to provider devices and escalated automatically to increase patient safety.

A hospital's care team directory is consolidated into one secure medical communication solution to remove outdated white board and paper based phone number and pager number look-ups - increasing accuracy and timeliness in communication.

Just as importantly, gain control over both hard and soft costs by investing in a unified clinical communication platform that will prepare your hospital for years to come.

Request a demo - Pager Replacement

Sources: Ponemon Institute on Impact of of Inefficient Communications in Healthcare - 2014; Frequency and Clinical Importance of Pages Sent to the Wrong Physician. American Medical Association, 2009.

Hospital Paging, Hospital Pager