News Release

Spok Appoints Bobbie Byrne, M.D. to Board of Directors

Industry Veteran Has Substantial Experience in Healthcare IT

SPRINGFIELD, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Spok Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPOK), a global leader in healthcare communications, today announced that effective immediately, it has appointed Dr. Bobbie Byrne, Chief Information Officer at Advocate Aurora Health, to its Board of Directors. Illinois-based Advocate Aurora Health is a twenty-eight-hospital system serving both Illinois and Wisconsin. At Advocate Aurora Health, Dr. Byrne is responsible for all information technology applications, information security, infrastructure, clinical informatics, data warehousing and business intelligence across the entire system. She has led all technical initiatives around the merger between Advocate and Aurora, including a single patient record and system integration.

“We are excited to have Bobbie join our board,” said Vincent D. Kelly, chief executive officer. “She is a leader in Healthcare IT and will make meaningful and immediate contributions as we continue to introduce our new, innovative, cloud-native and integrated communication platform, Spok Go®. Bobbie understands our value proposition, market and customers, and will have invaluable insights as we develop our software as a service (SaaS) platform to drive and extend Spok’s market leadership.”

Kelly also announced that Dr. Byrne will serve on the newly formed Cybersecurity Committee of the Board of Directors. The primary duties of the Cybersecurity Committee will be to enhance the board’s understanding and oversight of the policies, controls and procedures that Spok management has put in place to identify, manage and mitigate risks related to cybersecurity, privacy and disaster recovery. The committee will be chaired by current Director Stacia A. Hylton. Dr. Byrne will serve on this committee with current Director N. Blair Butterfield.

“I believe that Spok’s strategy is exactly aligned with the needs of healthcare organizations and I am excited to help the company achieve its full potential,” said Dr. Byrne. “For two decades I have assisted leading healthcare organizations implement technology solutions to improve patient care, efficiency and privacy. I believe I can assist Spok in capturing the large market opportunity to deliver clinical information to care teams when and where it matters most to improve patient outcomes.”

Dr. Byrne began her career in pediatrics and holds a master’s degree in business administration. Before joining Illinois-based Advocate, Dr. Byrne was executive vice president of consumer-driven health and chief medical and quality officer for Edward-Elmhurst Health, a three-hospital system in the Chicago suburbs. There she had responsibility for quality and safety, clinical research, information technology and patient experience. Dr. Byrne had previously served as Chief Information Officer there, overseeing the Epic and Lawson implementations throughout the system. During Dr. Byrne’s tenure, Edward-Elmhurst Health hospitals were named to Hospital & Health Networks’ list of the Most Wired Hospitals & Health Systems from 2013 through 2017. Dr. Byrne was also named to Becker’s Hospital Review’s 2016 list of 130 women hospital and health system leaders to know, and Becker’s 2015 lists of 24 female hospital and health systems CIOs to know; 100 hospital and health systems CIOs to know; and 10 physician CIOs to know. In 2015, Dr. Byrne was named by HealthData Management Magazine as a recipient of its inaugural Women in Healthcare IT and as one of its 50 Top Healthcare IT Experts. Dr. Byrne is board certified in pediatrics and clinical informatics. Dr. Byrne has also been Senior Vice President Clinical Solutions for Eclipsys Corporation (now Allscripts), an enterprise software development company. She was also a healthcare consultant at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young.

Dr. Byrne completed medical school at Northwestern University and pediatrics residency at Children’s Memorial Medical Center in Chicago. She also practiced at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and North Shore University Healthcare. She received her MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Dr. Byrne completed her BA at Northwestern University. She is active in the informatics work of the American Academy of Pediatrics, having served on the organization’s Physician Advisory Council for Informatics. She is board certified in both Pediatrics and Clinical Informatics.

The Board has retained Korn Ferry, a nationally recognized search firm, to help identify Board candidates with relevant business and development experience as the Company launches its latest software offering for critical health care communications, Spok Go®.

About Spok

Spok, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Spok Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPOK), headquartered in Plano, Texas, is proud to be a global leader in healthcare communications. We deliver clinical information to care teams when and where it matters most to improve patient outcomes. Top hospitals rely on the Spok Care Connect® platform to enhance workflows for clinicians and support administrative compliance. Our customers send over 70 million messages each month through their Spok® solutions. Spok enables smarter, faster clinical communication.

Spok is a trademark of Spok Holdings, Inc. Spok Mobile and Spok Care Connect are trademarks of Spok, Inc.

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act: 

Statements contained herein or in prior press releases which are not historical fact, such as statements regarding our future operating and financial performance, are forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results to be materially different from the future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expectations include, but are not limited to, our ability to manage wireless network rationalization to lower our costs without causing disruption of service to our customers; our ability to retain key management personnel and to attract and retain talent within the organization; the productivity of our sales organization and our ability to deliver effective customer support; our ability to identify potential acquisitions, finance, consummate and successfully integrate such acquisitions, and achieve the expected benefits of such acquisitions; economic conditions, such as recessionary economic cycles, the impact of trade disputes, tariffs and other trade protection measures,  higher interest rates, inflation and higher levels of unemployment; risks related to our overall business strategy, including maximizing revenue and cash generation from our established businesses and returning capital to stockholders through dividends and repurchases of shares of our common stock; competition for our services and products from new technologies or those offered and/or developed from firms that are substantially larger and have much greater financial and human capital resources; continuing decline in the number of paging units we have in service with customers, commensurate with a continuing decline in our wireless revenue; our ability to address changing market conditions with new or revised software solutions; undetected defects, bugs, or security vulnerabilities in our products; our dependence on the United States healthcare industry; long sales cycle of our software solutions and services; our reliance on third-party vendors to supply us with wireless paging equipment; our ability to maintain successful relationships with our channel partners; our ability to protect our rights in intellectual property that we own and develop and the potential for litigation claiming intellectual property infringement by us; our use of open source software, third-party software and other intellectual property; our reliance on data centers and other computer systems, hardware, software and satellite networks and telecommunications systems infrastructure (collectively, “IT Systems”) and technologies provided by third parties, and technology systems and electronic networks supplied and managed by third parties; cyberattacks, data breaches, system disruptions or other compromises to our or our critical third parties’ IT Systems (as defined below), data, products or services; our ability to realize the benefits associated with our deferred income tax assets; future impairments of our long-lived assets or goodwill; risks related to data privacy and protection-related laws and regulation; and our ability to manage changes related to regulation, including laws and regulations affecting hospitals and the healthcare industry generally, as well as other risks described from time to time in our periodic reports and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although Spok believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, it can give no assurance that its expectations will be attained. Spok disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Media Inquiries

Al Galgano
+1 (952) 224-6096
al.galgano@spok.com