Healthcare IT News reported that Hospital for Special Surgery centralized call center management by moving from pagers to secure cell phones for clinical communications.

As HSS performs approximately 32,000 surgeries a year, it is important for physicians to get high-priority messages as fast as possible.

With a pager, there was no way to discern whether the call was coming from a patient with a question, a patient who urgently needed treatment or from someone else. Nick Wirth, director of operational excellence at HSS, explains how pagers only lend themselves to a one-way communication and come with a high retrieval time. Under the new cell phone system, physicians can triage three messages and the system has built-in protocols so that high-priority calls are returned within five minutes.

With this change, HSS has created a higher level of patient safety for postoperative patients.

According to Wirth, if a patient calls the hospital after hours, the staff person who answers the phone can route the call directly to the on-call person with a generated text or secure voicemail.

Wirth has already seen some very positive results from this transformation.

Read the full article at HealthcareITNews.com.