Healthcare clinicians and the IT professionals who support them are hearing more and more about the untapped promise of secure text messaging tools.
Most people, after all, already have a cellphone and use it for texting, and the benefits are already well-understood for providers seeking a technological solution to help them simultaneously keep pace with tight schedules and meaningful use requirements.
What’s more, a recent Imprivata report finds that a whopping $11 billion is lost each year due to inefficient workflows and an absence of secure messaging solutions, which could win back some $5.8 billion of that amount. Providers believe about half of their wasted time could be reclaimed if they were allowed to adopt such software.
“In order to do more and do it better, we’ve got to offload some of the waste in our daily work. And when it comes to physicians, a lot of the work that is done is about corroborating with other people in the ecosystem and that takes up a lot of time,” Sawad Thotathil, MD, vice president of performance improvement for New England Inpatient Specialists, told mHealth News sister site Medical Practice Insider.
Thotahil’s method of bridging that ecosystem divide has a lot to do with asynchronous communication via his organization’s secure texting system, Cortext.
Secure messaging has to be done right, of course. It’s important to consider not only all of the vender options in the marketplace, but also whether eligible messaging systems can operate on existing devices “without compromising security,” Thotahil said.
Moreover, EHR integration and compatibility are also imperative to finding the solution that correlates well with a given entity.
“The key is to look for secure messaging technology that seamlessly integrates with existing EHR technologies — so physicians, nurses and other staff can use tools they already know,” said Andy Nieto, health IT strategist at DataMotion. “Naturally, physicians and their staff don’t want to learn another complex system.”
Get more details on the secure-messaging platforms Medical Practice Insider profiled via the hyperlinks to its site below:
DocbookMD: Where over 300,000 docs connect
hippomsg: Communicating without the financial squeeze
Imprivata Cortext: Seamless, secure messaging on a range of devices
Medigram: Timely care team conversations
MedXCom: Virtual house calls, secure messaging and more
PerfectServe DocLink: Talk and text in real-time
