Page 1 - Spok Inside Track

May 2020

Dear Spok Team,
I recently talked about this on our blog, but thought it’d be appropriate to
share it with you all here also.

Our paging network delivers over 100 million messages each month! The
continued popularity of pagers in healthcare has surprised many people—
yet they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. During the COVID-19
pandemic, pagers have become more important than ever.
With unmatched reliability and cost-effectiveness, the benefits of paging have, once again, brought the tried-
and-true pager to the front of clinical communication conversations. Here’s why:

1. Unbeatable reliability
Though many hospitals use smart devices for communications, they are often complemented with paging
because pagers are more reliable. Hospitals can be labyrinths of concrete and steel, and messages sent over
spotty cellular or Wi-Fi coverage may not be delivered successfully. In addition, the Spok paging network offers
99.92% reliability, so you can be certain that the care team gets alerts or messages immediately.
During a crisis or disaster, pagers allow staff to continue communicating when networks are down, or
operations are in crisis mode. Pagers work using a simple battery to connect to an extensive, highly reliable
external network unrelated to any hospital servers or infrastructure.

2. The right device for the right role
At 53%, more than half of nonclinical staff—including housekeepers, transport technicians, dietary staff, etc.—
still use pagers as their primary communication device for work. These roles typically don’t need EHR access,
clinical decision support, or other clinically-focused applications, so the inexpensive pager fulfills their
communication needs. A diverse device mix ensures each staff member has the mobile device best suited to
the nature of their work and reduces service and maintenance costs.

3. Options for encryption
Whether you have clinical or nonclinical roles using pagers, all members of the care team likely have instances
where they need to communicate protected health information (PHI) in their pages. Our proprietary one-way
and two-way encrypted pagers are fully secure and HIPAA-compliant, so care team members can safely send
any and all information needed to efficiently coordinate care, including patient name, DOB, room, condition,
etc., without worry. Each message is fully encrypted with the industry standard AES-128 encryption algorithm,
and each device is programmed with a unique key. With the additional display-lock security features and
remote data-wipe, the encrypted pager ensures fast, reliable, and
secure communication. John Deboer
VP, Tech Engineering
When it comes to critical communications in healthcare, paging is still Spok, Inc.
a powerful tool. In this incomparable time, we are here to do
everything we can to support our customers’ critical operations. And
we especially acknowledge and appreciate all of our essential team
members who continue to work tirelessly to make that happen.