Dr. Arya Nabavieh, an internal medicine hospitalist, was sick of feeling out of control of his own clinical communication. “Our 6-physician hospitalist group had a few different tools that we patched together to get communication about patient care to the right place, none of which worked particularly well.”

The hospitalists were always receiving communication from nurses and HUCs–consults, admits, order changes–and soon inefficiencies caused by their patched together solutions were taking up a significant portion of their day.

“When our answering service would page out messages to us, there were consistently a lot of typos and missing information — often this was crucial information in urgent clinical messages. We spent an inordinate amount of time trying to decipher messages, so we could take the next step correctly.” says Dr. Nabavieh.

Further, the hospitalists struggled with the answering service operators paging out messages to the wrong physician, often bothering them when they weren’t on duty and delaying patient care.

“It felt like we were out of control of our own patient’s care. As the physicians, we shouldn’t be reliant on operators that aren’t clinically trained to get us messages that are potentially urgent.”

“We wanted to be able to see the information we needed to advise on care, at a glance. Not have to call back and wait on hold or search frantically through the EMR to track it down. These days, we have enough administrative burden as physicians, so every inefficiency adds up.”

However, despite the frustration, Dr. Arya and his group had been carrying pagers and using a live operator answering service since they left residency. They figured that was just the way things were done.