Airports are noisy places with paging bells and announcements at every turn.  Hospitals should not be the same.  However, before the invention of medical paging systems communication amongst staff were noisier, more disruptive, and couple possibly invade upon a patient’s privacy.

Thanks to advancements in technology, HME Wireless has developed a Push Button hospital paging system to help rid a hospital of noise congestion and ensure quick and efficient communication between doctors and their staff.

For medical professionals, the benefits of the push-button hospital pager are vast – it is easy-to-use, simple to install and completely wireless. Push button paging improves communication between staff in a way that is completely seamless to patients.  For example, when a doctor is finished examining his patient, he can then page the nurse or receptionist to keep moving the patient through the process.

A Push Button pager is just another way that medical paging systems improve the overall health care experience.

There is nothing more awkward than discussing your personal medical information with hospital staff and having someone you know walk by. I know because this has happened to me before. And apparently I am not the only one as federal regulations continue to tighten forcing doctors to only discuss medical information with patients behind closed doors. With HME Wireless’ QuietCall IQ® and Push Button pagers, medical paging now helps medical facilities comply with HIPAA guidelines.

The QuietCall IQ hospital paging system pages families with a flash, beep or vibration.It protects their privacy, and eliminates the distraction and noise of overhead systems.Hospitals are able to improve service by providing convenient staff paging for patients.

Another great system is Push Button Paging. For example, if a patient has additional questions for a doctor who has already left the floor, a nurse can use a Push Button hospital pager to page for a doctor or nurse to return back to the room for immediate care.

Because a violation of HIPAA laws could mean suspension of medical licenses and or termination of staff, hospitals and medical facilities must pay close attention to the regulations.Implementing a medical paging system is a low-cost way to stay compliant, increase customer service and protect your bottom line.  For a full list of HIPAA guidelines, click here.

My stepmother is a nurse at a rape and trauma clinic. She deals with patients in very emotional states and has to perform many highly sensitive examinations on them. Her clinic uses a medical paging system to ensure they make the process as efficient as possible for the patient.

When I talked to her about using a hospital paging system she said in her niche of the medical community it is a no-brainer because when a patient comes to her clinic, he or she is usually very upset and nothing frustrates the patient more than when he or she has wait for long periods of time between staff visits.

The hospital pager enables the nurses and doctors to privately communicate when they are finished and ready for the next person to come in the room.  That way the lag time between doctor and nurse visits is drastically reduced, and the time a patient is left along is very limited.

The SmartCall® medical paging system gives medical staff the ability to correspond via text messaging, thus improving response time, eliminating the distraction of overhead systems and enhancing patient privacy. 

My mom and her husband recently moved San Diego. Her husband has some pretty extensive health issues, so they spend a lot of time at doctor’s offices. Since he is getting established with the new doctors, he has undergone a lot of baseline testing. My mother has been so pleased that the facility has a medical paging system in place so she is free to roam the facility and experience all of its offerings.

We started talking about this because when I saw her today she had a new purse that was purchased from the gift shop at the medical center. She went on to tell me about their fabulous gift shop and list off all of her new purchases made there. Then she started talking about the wonderful cafeteria and how she loves eating lunch there every time she goes.

When I asked her how she managed to do all of this and get back in time for her husband, she said that it is because they have this fancy hospital paging system that notifies her when he is ready to be picked up. She was so enamored by the service that she said she would probably never switch health care providers because of it. In all of the medical facilities they have been to, this is the first that has such a medical paging system and she sees it as a tremendous value-add for caretakers and patients alike.

Not only is the medical facility seeing increased patient satisfaction and loyalty because of the hospital pagers, but they are also enabling patients and visitors to roam the facility and make purchases, which helps drive revenue. Want to learn more?

Here is a great video that shows the medical paging system in action.

I recently had the pleasure of reconnecting with an old friend from ninth grade. Even though seeing her made me feel like a kid again, we’re all grown up now and she’s taking care of kids as a profession – she is a pediatrician.  Upon learning this, I asked if at her hospital she uses a medical paging system and she responded with a resounding yes.

She went on to tell me that there are so many doctors and nurses that take care of newborn babies and their mothers that without hospital pagers, it would be total mayhem.  At her hospital the medical paging system alert the team of when a procedure is completed, it provides an ongoing status of a patient’s progress and condition, and it alerts other members of the team when it is their time to visit the patient.

According to my friend, who has worked in hospitals with and without medical paging systems, a hospital with a paging system makes for a much more seamless doctor-patient experience.  She felt that having the hospital paging system makes all of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes run more smoothly, and helps the patient feel that the staff is more efficient, better informed and very attentive to their needs.

A system like HME Wireless' Push Button Paging system allows doctors to deliver more attentive care, to more patients. Upon completing an examination, the doctor can page an x-ray technician, a nurse, the receptionist - whomever she needs to notify - and keep things moving. What’s more, a Push Button Paging transmitter can also be installed in each examining room, and enables prompt assistance from support staff.

On our second day in the hospital with our new bundle of joy, our doctor came in to check on us. When he was done he used a push-button medical paging system to let the nurse she could come in to see if there was anything else we needed. I was amazed how connected such a simple paging device could make a hospital that much more efficient.   I asked the nurse about it and she mentioned how helpful the hospital paging system has been.  She liked how the push-button paging enabled instant communication between various staff in departments across the hospital to speed processes.

Here are a few ways that hospital pagers can aid in a more pleasant hospital experience for both patients and staff:

Patients
·         Allow for more direct communication with medical staff
·         Foster rest and healing through better access to health care information
·         More expeditious responses to patient needs
·         A more positive health care experience.

Medical Staff
·         Mobile access to patient requests and needs
·         Ability to respond to patients in real time
·         Improved customer service
·         Instant communication between various departments in the hospital
·         Keep patients informed of status of requests

Because this medical paging system was in place, there were little to no problems (except for construction noise—but that’s a whole other issue). I am convinced that this ultimately helped in our recovery process.  Better communication promotes better health care.

After 12 hours of labor and virtually zero progress, the doctor decided it was time to get my baby out via cesarean section.  Modern-day labor and delivery dictate that dad goes into the operating room with mom during the surgery; however, beforehand there is a lot of surgical preparation that require the two to be apart.  As they wheeled me away to get ready, my husband was left on his own until summoned.  Boy, would a hospital pager have come in handy in this scenario!!

Previously unbeknownst to me,   I have a very high tolerance to anesthetic, so what normally takes 15 minutes to prep, took upwards of 45 minutes.  All the while, my husband was a nervous wreck sitting alone in our room thinking we forgot about him and that he would miss the birth of his first-born child.  Scared he wouldn’t be found when his cue to join me arrived, he sprinted to the nurses’ station to find out what was going on, only to be banished back to his room and told to wait.  Had a medical paging system been in place, my husband could have rested assured that all was well and that he was not missing a thing.

Finally, when the nurses came to get him and brought him in to join me in the operating room, he told me of his concerns that he had been forgotten. I felt terrible, but since no cell phones were allowed in the OR, I had no way to update him on why it was taking longer than normal. A hospital paging system like HME Wireless’ SmartCall™ would have allowed for my husband to receive real-time text updates – even while he was pacing the halls working off nervous energy.

The good news is that he didn’t miss a thing and he was right by my side as our bouncing baby boy entered the world.

About four months ago, I delivered beautiful baby boy.  For those of you who have gone through this experience, you know that it can be a time of great excitement and anxiety where everything feels brand new.  Knowing what I know now about medical paging, I think of how much that technology would have alleviated stress from the entire process.  Because in my opinion there would have been so many uses for a hospital paging system in labor and delivery, this will be a multi-part series.

I am going to start by focusing on my arrival to the hospital.  Once checked in, we were bombarded by calls and texts messages from our friends and family who were in the waiting room wanting status updates on our progress.  Any of you that have been in hard labor know that trying to breathe your way through a contraction while talking on the phone or responding to a text message is nearly impossible.  How wonderful would it have been if my visitors were given a hospital pager to be notified of our status?

Here are just a handful of ways that labor and delivery could have benefitted from a medical paging system:

For the parents-to-be:

• Ease of communication with visitors.
• Less stress of providing minute-to-minute updates, thus giving parents the ability to focus on the labor.
• Information sharing at major milestones.
• The feeling of keeping loved ones included in the process even when they aren’t physically in the same room with you.

For the visitors:

• The ability to run errands for and help parents-to-be with things they need but can’t do while in labor and delivery.
• Provide peace-of-mind to visitors that the process is going smoothly.
• Enable visitors to take a break from the waiting room to go to the cafeteria or outside to get some fresh air (or in my family’s case, to the car to take a nap … my labor was very long and went late into the night).
• Update visitors with the announcement that the new bundle of joy has entered the world.

This technology would have taken the stress away from my husband and me having to respond to all of the visitors and enabled us to focus more on the challenging task at hand.

Every time I hear how a different business or organization is using wireless paging systems, I continue to be amazed. I just truly cannot imagine where wireless technology will be in just 12 months, much less to think of how it will change our lives 5 years from now.

I don’t know about you but when I think of wireless pagers, the first thought that comes to mind is restaurant pagers. For myself, when I think of the typical restaurant I don’t ever really think of a restaurant/bar. And I especially don’t think of a smaller loud environment type establishment.

I recently watched an episode on Spike TV called “Bar Rescue”. I love these shows, like Kitchen Nightmares where they try to turn failing restaurants around. Anyway, as I watched this show I was yet again so amazed at how wireless pagers can help SO many different companies. This show in particular was a small bar. The bar sold food as well. When they were really busy the chef yelled “HANDS” to get the wait staff to come get their orders! Can you imagine? I can’t imagine how stressful that was for the chef much less the staff. How difficult would that be to never know if it was your food that was ready?

This restaurant/bar implemented a restaurant paging system. Basically, it is put in the kitchen so the chef can page the wait staff instantly, when the food is ready for pick up while it is still hot and fresh. We all know how frustrating it can be when you are hungry and your food arrives and it isn’t hot. Not only is this tremendous help to the chef and waiters but the guest gets their food quicker and it allows the server to not waste time running back and forth to the kitchen. The waiter can spend more time “serving” the customer. After implementing this restaurant pager system, the restaurants revenue increased by 27% in the first 30 days.

These restaurant pagers have a special feature called “auto recall”. This feature automatically pages the server up to three times; if unanswered the manager is paged to provide assistance. It also has another great feature that the manager can use to page the entire staff at the same time. I think we have only just begun to see the many ways wireless pagers can be such an added benefit in many different organizations.

Here is the link to the “Bar Rescue” episode. http://www.spike.com/full-episodes/mdaw98/bar-rescue-hogtied-ham-s-season-1-ep-110

Are you a sports fan? I’ve never really been one but it seems like everyone around me is. Growing up, my mom was a huge football and baseball fan, and now I have my husband with the Cowboys and Rangers. So I’ve gotten used to sports being played on the television every weekend.

Since moving to Georgia, the games we watch aren’t played on the local stations. So, we only get to watch the Cowboys play on occasion. Unless we make a trek to a local sports bar where all games are shown on a blaze of glowing screens. I have always loved the benefits of wireless restaurant paging but I guess I never thought of how it could benefit a sports bar. I was amazed to find how useful they can be.

I wanted to surprise my husband and find a local spot where we could watch the Cowboys play and enjoy some good food and refreshments. Someone mentioned a restaurant/bar that was nearby that sounded perfect. When we walked in, the first thing my husband noticed were the restaurant pagers! My first thought was that they probably use them for the restaurant side, not even thinking about how a bar could benefit.

I have never been to a dining establishment that had so many televisions. We asked to be seated at a table airing the Cowboy’s game. We were told it was first come, first serve but ended up in a great seat with a perfect view of the game. The nice thing about this sports bar was with all the TVs, everyone could watch whatever game they were interested in. It seemed however, that there are a lot of Cowboy fans in Georgia as every TV in the area was set to the Cowboy’s game.

I was intrigued so I decided to interview the waiter. I asked if the bar was most popular on game days and if they ever resorted to using the pagers in here. I was interested in how restaurant pagers were a benefit to this environment. The waiter told me that during the games it gets really crazy and that one of the best things about the restaurant paging system is that it’s great when a big group comes in. After everyone has ordered their food, the guys can go have a beer at the bar and watch the game on the big screen while the ladies stay at the table and can talk or watch the game, whichever they prefer. When the food is being served back at the customers table, he can just send out a page and the customer knows to come back to the table.

He said how much their customers enjoy the restaurant/bar setting and they like being able to go have a beer at the bar, watch the game and know that their food will be piping hot when they get back to their table.

Wow! I didn’t think wireless paging could get any better but I think this is great. I really enjoyed this whole experience and think I could easily see myself enjoying sports a whole lot more in this environment. Oh, and by the way, the Cowboys won in overtime!