At OnPage, we often see healthcare administrators pushing back against the use of personal smartphones. Administrators believe that enabling bring-your-own-device (BYOD) presents a security threat in healthcare. Indeed, BYOD security in healthcare is challenging and leads to many questions. For example, many hospital administrators wonder how they can ensure that ePHI is not intercepted and … Continued
What’s so hard about the encryption of healthcare mobile messaging? Last week, I came across an interesting article on encryption and healthcare mobile messaging. The article pointed out that pointed out the need for mobile device security when practitioners exchange PHI. Apparently, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) … Continued
Replace pagers with clinical communications platforms to improve physician accountability In a recent article written by Providence Community Health Center’s CMO, Dr. Andrew Saal wrote that his hospital needed to replace pagers to improve physician accountability. By using pagers, physicians had and continue to have a readily available crutch – a crutch they could use … Continued
Client Spotlight: Providence Community Health Center The following article was written by Dr. Andrew Saal, Chief Medical Officer at Providence Community Health Centers in Providence, Rhode Island. For the last three decades, our physicians and practitioners have stayed in touch using state of the art technology from 1990. Luckily, not much has changed in the … Continued
Pagers cost the UK’s Health System Millions This past September, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) reported that by simply replacing pagers, they could save £2.7 Million ($3.6 Million) per year. At present, the NHS spends almost £6.6 Million ($8.7 Million) supporting the under-performing service and staff want the NHS to find alternatives. Shadow Communications … Continued
4 Paths to minimize alert fatigue in healthcare While long an issue in IT, alert fatigue in healthcare has only recently been recognized as a significant issue. In healthcare, the term alert fatigue describes how busy workers become desensitized to safety alerts resulting from clinical decision support (CDS) systems or electronic health records (EHR) and … Continued
When it comes to the sensitive data stored and transmitted within healthcare organizations, complying with the guidelines set out by HIPAA can promote the safety of information as well as the avoidance of fines and potential legal action. However, if the technology is overly complicated or the compliance rules require excessive steps for compliance then … Continued
Fragmentation of care occurs when physician communications lack the necessary tools and methods for coordinated healthcare communications. For example, with fragmented communications, communications will break down between emergency department and care centers or between house staff at end-of-shift or between different care departments managing a patients’ needs. Indeed, in a typical scenario, more than 1 … Continued
On a typical chaotic hospital floor, the steady cacophony is deafening. Landlines ring. Overhead paging systems blurt out instructions. Physicians are using their pagers to arrange consults. A nurse is yelling out updates to the coverage schedule. Physician are on the phone discussing a patient’s treatment options. And in the midst of all this … Continued
When healthcare security executives were asked what issues keep them awake at night, survey respondents in a Forrester Research study most often cited the misuse of personally identifiable patient information (86 percent). This fear makes sense given that most hospitals still rely on pagers and insecure communication formats like Facebook and GChat. These formats do … Continued
