Enable Smarter Enterprise Communications in a Changing Healthcare Environment

Hospitals today are faced with many communication challenges, which are impacted by everything from regulatory compliance to reduced reimbursements to an increasingly mobile staff in a fast-paced care environment.

People and technology now need to communicate flawlessly to speed response times and keep safety and satisfaction at the forefront. With Spok^®, it’s possible for one unified communication system to solve multiple challenges across different areas and departments of the hospital. It improves workflows across the organization, from the contact center to the patient’s bedside and includes everyone on your care teams, from doctors and nurses to housekeeping and transport staff. It scales to support growing clinical communications needs as your organization and the healthcare industry evolve.

A Fully Integrated Enterprise Healthcare Communication Platform

Spok supports more than 1,900 hospitals—both large and small—in their quest to deliver the highest standards of care with communication technology designed to meet today’s challenges. Spok is passionate about critical communications in healthcare. For Spok, every message is important because we know that minutes and seconds matter in a hospital, where patients' lives are at stake.

We offer a full clinical communication platform, called Spok Care Connect^®, which integrates with existing workflows in your hospital and will enable you to deliver information quickly and securely into the hands of the clinicians who need to act on it—wherever they are and on whatever device they are using. From the contact center to the patient's bedside, the Spok Care Connect communication platform provides directory details, on-call schedules, staff preferences, secure texting, and a lot more.

Integrated Suite:
Spok offers the most comprehensive suite of enterprise healthcare communication solutions, which work together to support your workflows.

Workflow-Driven Communications:
Our products are not generic call or message products. We provide solutions that drive workflows, whether that's code STEMIs or consult requests, nurse calls or care team communications.

Multi-Modal:
We're not just texting or paging. Our solutions include secure messaging, voice, alarms, and alerts across many modalities, so we offer you the most flexible options.

Certifications and Integrations:
We work extensively with all the leading providers of systems you have in your hospital today. Spok solutions are used in the most critical of environments. We certify our products with many leading vendors as well as government entities such as JITC/DOD, the FDA, and the FCC.

Enterprise Directory:
The directory, scheduling, and preference data at the heart of our system serves as a single source of truth across the hospital.

Trends and Requirements Affecting Hospitals Today

Spok Care Connect helps healthcare organizations tackle multiple challenges facing the industry, including:

Connecting Disparate Healthcare Systems: Interoperability

There are many disconnected systems in hospitals that need to share information. These span clinical, security, building management, electronic health records, IT, health information, transport, critical test results, and many more. Numerous organizations are focused on eliminating these islands of information by linking hospital systems, allowing important information to pass among them.

Supporting Secure, Mobile Communications

Staff are on the go and carry the latest smartphones, tablets, and other devices. IT teams must develop mobile device management (MDM) policies and enforce them, particularly when ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) programs are involved. These policies should include plans for what tools are supported, encryption, how to remove sensitive information from a lost/stolen device, and managing authenticated access to web directories and on-call schedules.

Protecting Information Security/PHI

With the increase in mobile communications comes the increased risk of compromised protected health information (PHI). Organizations and patients benefit from proactive, documented security measures.

Improving Efficiency

More than ever, staff cannot waste time looking for information, people, supplies, or open beds. Notifications must go to the right people, doctors need a way to find one another for important conversations, and automated information sharing from clinical systems needs to be embraced for efficient care and interaction.

Achieving Compliance

Many regulatory bodies and laws affect hospitals, including the Joint Commission, HIPAA, and the HITECH Act. Audit trails, encrypted communications, efficient code call handling, and accurate reporting are all keys to compliance.

Raising and Tracking Patient Satisfaction

The nationwide Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey tracks patient satisfaction scores, with many questions focused on communication. The strength of caregiver-patient communication and having quiet, healing environments are key elements.

Maintaining Reimbursements

With payment models moving away from hospitals simply being paid for services rendered and toward payment for quality performance, hospital revenues are at risk of going down if top-notch care is not delivered every time. There is a need to identify opportunities for improved workflows to ensure safety and effective communications while lowering costs. In addition, reimbursements rise with patient satisfaction scores. Spok solutions help hospitals improve patient care and satisfaction by getting assist calls to staff more quickly, and can reduce readmissions through better and more direct communication with patients.