Michael Sorensen, in his old job as chief technology officer of the University of Chicago Medical Center, had a problem: pagers.
Healthcare is one of the few areas where the pager still tenaciously hangs on in the age of the smartphone. A combination of factors contributes to this: many hospital CTOs find pagers more reliable than cellphones in a large hospital complex, and a switch to...
Vocera Communications, maker of wireless communications systems for healthcare, went public this week by listing its shares on the NYSE with the symbol "VCRA". Vocera's systems are installed in more than 800 hospitals and healthcare facilities across the globe. The offering included more than 5.8 million shares priced at $16.
Vocera first filed for its IPO last August when it noted that the...
More than 80 percent of physicians in the US now have smartphones. About a third have tablets. Despite the aggressive adoption rates of these devices many physicians still carry pagers. Yes, plenty of healthcare-specific messaging services are now available for physicians with smartphones, and we cover the launch of these services at MobiHealthNews. Is it really time to move away from the pager?...
Onset Technology released OnPage this week, a subscription-based mobile app for iOS and BlackBerry that acts as a pager-like priority messaging service. Onset is no newcomer to the mobile messaging space: The company was founded in 1997.
OnPage aims to attract doctors who still use pagers as a priority messaging system by eliminating the need to carry two devices, while still providing a higher...
New wireless Irish group has wireless health SIG: A new wireless industry networking group, WirelessLAB, aims to promote Ireland as a center of excellence for wireless technology and provided members with a "platform to increase their visibility both at home and internationally." Among the founders is Dr. Conor Hanley, co-founder and CEO, BiancaMed, a wireless health start-up focused on...
Voalte announced this week a collaboration agreement with Sarasota Memorial Hospital that sees the care facility's nurses using Voalte's iPhone-based voice, alarm and text offering. Trey Lauderdale, Vice President of Innovation at Voaltė explained to MobiHealthNews in a recent interview that the service allows Sarasota Memorial's nurses to send and receive text messages, make voice calls, and...
Nurses at the University of Minnesota Medical Center began using ASCOM "smartphones" about six months ago, according to a report on Fox News. While the handsets are note "smartphones" in the traditional sense, they do seem to cut down on the wait time it takes for nurses to answer patients' beckons since the handsets are always on the nurse's belt or around their neck. The handsets also integrate...
Last week we wrote about the growing popularity of smartphones among doctors and their growing use at hospitals. We wondered what it would take for smartphones to displace legacy pagers.
After posting our article with the question: "What's it going to take for smartphones to replace pagers in hospitals?" we received a number of comments. We reprinted a few of them below with the authors'...
No surprise here.
Popular medical blogger Dr. Kevin Pho, also known as KevinMD, has a noteworthy post on the growing popularity of smartphone use in hospitals and smartphones' "inevitable" displacement of pagers. A recent study by Manhattan Research found that 64 percent of doctors use smartphones like BlackBerrys or iPhones. Each of those platforms support mobile applications that provide pager...
