St George Hospital Selects Spok for Timely Delivery Of Radiology Results to Smartphones

PERTH, Australia (14 January 2016) – Spok, Inc. today announced that St George Hospital in Sydney, Australia, has selected Spok^® solutions for Radiology result notification and web directory to improve clinician communications and patient care. By sending all Radiology test results directly to the requesting clinicians’ smartphones, the solutions help St George improve turnaround time for communicating the findings—thus accelerating patient treatment plans and care.

St George Hospital wanted a system to allow Radiology to automatically communicate the report to the requesting doctor in addition to sending the report to the electronic medical record (eMR). “With Spok solutions in place, all Radiology test results, including Preliminary and Authorised results, are automatically sent to the doctor who requested the test,” said Dr. Derek Glenn, Director of Radiology for St George Hospital.

The Spok Mobile secure smartphone messaging app encrypts messages from the Radiology Information System (RIS) and sends them to the requesting clinician. The test results reach the right clinician’s preferred device based on the requesting doctor identity received from the eMR and the list of matching registered users in the secure Spok directory. Spok Mobile raises an alert on the referring doctor’s mobile phone to access the information. To cancel the alert or securely forward to other registered clinicians, the user is required to enter a user name and a password.

The Spok application allows clinicians to view the patient’s test results securely with the username and password authentication. It’s a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant application which has remote wipe capabilities and leaves the message on the device for a limited time-period. HIPAA sets a national standard in the United States to protect medical records and other personal health information and is widely recognised as an example of best-practice in this area.

“We needed a way to measure the turnaround time it takes for requesting clinicians to actually receive and acknowledge test results after they are made available. The reporting and audit trail capabilities of Spok’s solutions give us a clear view of the communications from start to finish,” said Dr. Glenn.

St George Hospital’s Department of Radiology also uses Spok’s Radiology result notification solution to notify referring clinicians when images are available in the system, before the report is generated. “This was a request from the referring community that we hadn’t considered before. Keeping doctors up-to-date on where their patients are in the imaging chain goes a long way in expediting the patient journey. This means that the requesting doctor receives an automatically generated ‘Images Available’ message as soon as the images are created,” said Dr. Glenn.

About St George Hospital
As part of South Eastern Sydney Local Health District (SESLHD) in Australia, St George Hospital is the major teaching hospital for University of New South Wales. The 627-bed hospital provides Level 1 Trauma care for the district and has one of the busiest emergency departments in the state, providing care for many. In addition, St George Hospital offers comprehensive services to the community including many centres of excellence. Learn more about St George Hospital at https://www.seslhd.health.nsw.gov.au/about-south-eastern-sydney-local-health-district.