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Roswell Park Cancer Institute Selects Spok Mobile for Secure Smartphone TextingSpok, Inc. announced today that Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) in Buffalo, N.Y., has added Spok's secure smartphone texting to its critical communication suite. Spok Mobile allows RPCI clinicians to send and receive sensitive patient health information in a HIPAA-compliant manner. "Device-to-device messaging is a huge hit. Our clinicians love it," said Colleen Sarick, director of Enterprise Communications (News - Alert) at RPCI. "Secure texting has been an important investment in enhancing our patient care coordination." RPCI is a teaching hospital with more than 3,500 employees and a campus that spans over 15 blocks. During a hospital expansion project in 2011, the Institute determined that it needed a new approach for how clinicians exchanged critical messages to help ensure patient safety. "One of our requirements was that our new communication solution had to be multi-functional to justify the cost of the investment," said Sarick. "Whatever we chose had to be acceptable for our finance team as well as our end users, so we wanted something that would support paging, text messaging, email, medical apps, the Internet, and the ability to make phone calls." nce the team decided to introduce secure smartphone texting, RPCI ran a trial with Spok Mobile in select clinical and ancillary areas. They chose the hospitalist and housekeeping teams since both groups need to communicate frequently. RPCI also experimented with fully functional smartphones and those with data-only service. The pilot projects paid off: RPCI learned that using both types of phones would achieve significant cost savings. Clinicians, who need to be reachable at all times, received fully functional smartphones, while other staff who don't need access to voice services received smartphones with data-only plans. "Staff found that they have more accessibility now," said Sarick. "They can email while running around, and call a colleague back without having to first locate a landline. Having mobile access to the directory and on-call schedules is convenient as well as a time saver. People really like the ability to text securely and include as much information about the patient as they need to in order to provide the best care."
About Roswell Park Cancer Institute
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