LONDON, Ont. – Pagers have now been replaced by web-based technology at St. Joseph’s Health Care and the London Health Sciences Centre – an urgent need as the companies providing pager service were getting out of that business.

“Recently, (London Health Sciences Centre) transitioned to a new messaging solution that is web-based and secure. Developed by our ITS department, the system offers improvements over the old paging technology, which is no longer vendor-supported,” a spokesperson for London’s largest hospital told the London Free Press.

The new system allows hospital staff and doctors to receive instant messages, and unlike traditional pagers, allow senders to include text and not just a call-back number.

The new system is half as expensive as the paging service that had included about 4,500 pagers, the chief executive of St. Joseph’s Health Care told her board this spring.

“With approximately 4,500 pagers in use at the hospitals, receiving an average of more than 4,000 pages per day, and with paging technology quickly becoming obsolete and no replacement products on the horizon, the need to find a replacement solution was becoming critical,” Gillian Kernaghan (pictured) wrote in a report to the hospital board.

That led the hospitals to bring in software developers to brainstorm about replacements in a series of five “hackathons” which led to the creation of a web-based service called “Beep.” The new service was launched April 24, Kernaghan wrote.

“It is a web-based, secure and configurable solution tailor-made for St. Joseph’s and LHSC. It will also cost 50 percent less than the current paging system,” she wrote.