While pagers are still ubiquitous in hospital settings as a means of physician to physician communication, group messaging smartphone applications are proving to improve team communication, found a study in Journal of Hospital Medicine.
Three inpatient medicine teams at Stanford (Calif.) Hospital started using a HIPAA-compliant group messaging app in addition to pagers, and two inpatient medicine teams used only paging for their means of communication.
The HIPAA-compliant group messaging was rated more effective both in allowing users to communicate thoughts clearly and efficiently and integrating into workflow during rounds and patient discharge, as compared to paging. Additionally, 85 percent of respondents testing the HIPAA-compliant group messaging said they would recommend using the communication system on the wards.
"Smartphone-based, HIPAA-compliant group messaging applications improve provider perception of in-hospital communication, while providing the information security that paging and commercial cellular networks do not," the authors concluded.
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