Building future-ready critical communication: key takeaways from Connect 25

• Connect is an annual customer conference that invites Spok customers from contact centers, clinical teams, IT departments, and more.   
• Speakers explained how continuing education empowers teams to succeed, and how contact center reporting can identify operational gaps.  
• Other sessions highlighted the role of various tools and solutions in facilitating effective communication and enabling automated delivery of clinical test results. 
• These topics support this year’s theme of creating future-ready critical communications.  

In mid-October, Spok hosted its annual customer conference: Connect 25. This all-day event brought together professionals from all corners of healthcare, from clinicians to contact center operators.  

One of our core values at Spok is putting the customer first in everything we do. Connect 25 was built around that principle by delivering essential insights through educational panels, fireside chats, Q&A segments, and more. 

This year’s theme, future-ready critical communication, speaks to the changing medical landscape and how healthcare organizations can thrive in the years to come. With that in mind, here are our most important takeaways from Connect 25.  

Continuing education is essential for streamlining clinical onboarding and employee success  

High turnover is a significant challenge for hospitals and health systems. When looking at nurses alone, the national average turnover rate was 16.4% in 2024.  

When onboarding new employees is delayed, healthcare organizations experience service gaps that add stress to current staff and increase the risk of critical communication errors.  

A study from JAMA Health Forum found that 12% of physicians and 26% of nurses rated their hospitals unfavorably for patient safety. Among them, 28% of physicians and 54% of nurses pointed to “having too few nurses” as the primary reason.  

During budget cuts, training designed for streamlining clinical onboarding is often one of the first areas to be eliminated. Yet the need doesn’t go away—it simply shifts the burden onto frontline staff and support teams. 

Inconsistent materials also create confusion; when staff aren’t trained uniformly about their critical communication solutions, support teams are then flooded with the same questions.  

To break this cycle, hospitals and health systems should consider investing in continuing education and resources that are role-based, self-paced, and continuously updated. 

The result is a more informed workforce, reduced onboarding time, and fewer disruptions to everyday operations. 

Contact center reporting and analytics provide powerful insights to improve operations 

Contact centers are the heart of critical communications. Your operators are handling urgent messages, routing escalations, and connecting care teams across departments.  

As a centralized hub of information, contact centers generate a wealth of operational and clinical data. If you’re only measuring metrics like call volume and response times, you’re really just scratching the surface.  

Digging deeper into your contact center analytics can uncover inefficiencies, reveal communication bottlenecks, and inform how to optimize escalation paths.   

At the same time, smarter contact center reporting helps reduce alert fatigue by identifying which notifications are unnecessary or redundant. This empowers hospitals to reevaluate their alerting procedures and filter out the noise, so care teams receive only what’s truly actionable. 

The outcome? Improved productivity and experiences for contact center operators and better interactions for callers on the other line.  

Effective critical communication starts with a variety of tools and solutions    

Clinicians have vastly different workflows depending on their responsibilities. A bedside nurse, for instance, concentrates on responding to patient alerts, while a physician prioritizes making timely decisions based on a patient’s test results. 

Because of this, hospitals and health systems shouldn’t have a “one size fits all” approach to critical communication solutions and tools.  

Clinicians differ in the devices they prefer, such as pagers over smartphones or tablets, for their lightweight designs, user-friendly interfaces, and long battery life. Not to mention, pagers stay online when internet and cellular service goes down. 

An enterprise directory, when paired with on-call scheduling, also streamlines critical communications. These solutions ensure that the right physician is contacted at the right time to keep patient care on track.  

Automated processes prevent clinical results from slipping through the cracks 

In many hospitals today, result handoffs between radiologists and ordering clinicians remain very manual and are a leading cause of medical errors in critical communications.  

These fragmented and time-consuming processes typically involve phone calls, faxes, and emails that are difficult to track for regulatory purposes. In fact, compliance rates with radiology follow-up recommendations are often as low as 39%.  

Clinical test result notifications (CTRN) are critical communication solutions that route this information directly via an HL7 interface. After a provider acknowledges it, this technology integrates bi-directionally with your clinical systems and EHR.  

If the ordering clinician doesn’t review the test result within a designated time frame, the system automatically escalates the notification to the next available care team member for timely follow-up. 

All in all, Connect 25 highlighted a clear theme: future-ready critical communications are essential to operational excellence in healthcare.   

From contact center analytics to staff education for streamlining clinical onboarding, these initiatives create a more connected, responsive, and resilient care environment. 

With fewer distractions and more innovative workflows, your employees can focus on what they do best—delivering exceptional patient experiences.