When doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers need to send messages to one another, it’s critical that only the intended receiver sees their texts and photos.
Studies have shown that roughly 70 percent of accidental deaths or serious injuries in hospitals are tied to gaps in communication, while a University of Maryland study put the monetary cost of those communication gaps at $12 billion annually.
That’s why Vocera Messaging is becoming a go-to messaging platform for healthcare workers to stay connected at major hospitals and clinics across the country.
In its simplest description, Vocera Messaging is a secure enterprise messaging and alerting solution that provides smartphone users robust, reliable, HIPAA-compliant delivery of critical pages, text, messages, alarms, data and alerts. Users can receive and send messages from smartphones, through a web-based console, or through integrated third-party clinical systems.
“With the rise of population health, the importance of care coordination is greater than ever. The best way to improve how care teams communicate and collaborate is to provide solutions that are easy to use, secure, and integrated with other clinical systems,” says Brent Lang, Vocera’s president & CEO. “Vocera Secure Texting help the extended care teams reach the right person, at the right time, on the right device, with the right information, in the right place.”
Vocera Alert and Chat provides secure, auditable alerting and reporting and allows secure, permissions-based sharing of documents and other content. Additionally, Vocera Notify enables automated text-to-voice calling, email, SMS, and PIN-to-PIN for mass communication.
But Vocera isn’t the only company in the secure message space for healthcare businesses.
In March, Silicon Valley healthcare information technology company NavisHealth Solutions, Inc. released Engage, a two-way communication platform built to support secure communication between patients and healthcare providers.
Engage allows patients mobile access to health records, assists in scheduling routine appointments, and lets them see and share lab results, health tips and instructions.
“Patients increasingly want to access their own information and become more involved in their own care, and Engage is a critical first step in facilitating clear communication between patients and healthcare professionals through mobile health technology,” says Kit Sun, NavisHealth’s CEO. “As consumers become more comfortable and reliant on technology, there is an urgent role for the EHR [Electronic Health Record] to provide a suite of mobile tools that can be an effective channel for two-way communication.”
With Engage, hospitals of any size can quickly launch fully branded native mobile applications for iPhone and Android to give patients the tools they need to better manage their healthcare information and facilitate better communication with medical professionals.
Engage has been successfully deployed and provides coverage at a number of small- to medium-sized hospitals and health centers, including Salina Regional Health Center in Kansas.
“Access to the Engagemobile app and our Health Portal are user-friendly systems that empower patients to become more active managers of their own care,” says Michael McEldowney, information services director at Salina Regional Health Center. “Patients who are more informed are more likely to seek the best practices to maintain and achieve good health.”
For healthcare providers, it’s more important than ever before to be able to rely on reliable, secure communications. Thankfully there’s no longer a need to rely on consumer applications that aren’t built for the strict demands of healthcare messaging.
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