Health Sciences North axes pagers and fragmented call schedules

Clinical staff at Health Sciences North (HSN) in Sudbury, Ontario, surrendered their pagers on November 1 when the hospital went live with Hypercare’s cell phone and web-based communication software.

“HSN had a burning need to replace physician pagers and improve page request turnaround times, which were not up to par with the needs of our clinical care teams,” said Lindsay Cooper, the HSN project manager who supported the implementation.

Using pagers, clinical teams wouldn’t know if their page requests were read or even received. Nor could they communicate the urgency of a call. Now, they can see a clear indicator in the app confirming a message has been sent, delivered or read and they can see whether the message priority was normal, urgent or stat.

“When clinicians see a read receipt on their message, that’s live feedback they weren’t getting before,” said Cooper.

The hospital-wide deployment has physicians using their own cellphones and nurses using Hypercare primarily on nursing station computers.

The HIPAA and PHIPA-compliant Hypercare solution also frees HSN staff from using Excel spreadsheets for on-call schedules that were only accessible on the hospital’s intranet or printed and posted on bulletin boards. Using Hypercare, the on-call schedule is on the app and is updated in real-time when a physician changes their shift. This ensures clinicians are referring to the most up-to-date on-call schedule.

“Our project team began researching possible solutions through the winter/spring of 2023 to see what options were out there,” said Cooper. “Hypercare popped up as part of that research and a decision to go with them was made in August.”

Toronto-based Hypercare’s CEO, Albert Tai, was effusive in his praise for HSN and its project team for the rapid deployment. “HSN did a fantastic job making decisions and moving the process forward,” said Tai. “If all healthcare organizations moved that fast, healthcare wouldn’t be this broken. HSN was very clear about what needed to be deployed right away and didn’t try to boil the ocean, so that helped us deploy the solution very quickly to solve their immediate pain points.”

Cooper is equally complimentary about how the two teams worked together to deploy the application in record time.

“We quickly built a strong team dynamic between our HSN project team and the Hypercare team which allowed us to work quickly and effectively together,” said Cooper. “The Hypercare team was flexible in adapting to our project needs and provided hands on support directly with our clinicians.”

The HSN project team consulted widely on the policies and procedures for using the application, inviting input from clinicians and Hypercare staff.

Policies included expected response times for normal, urgent and stat messages, how changes to on-call schedules would be made after hours and whether physician orders could be processed through Hypercare messaging.

“Our project team was instrumental to HSN’s deployment and consisted of members across Information Technology, Telecommunications, Switchboard, Medical and Academic Affairs, Quality and Patient Safety, Medical Staff and Nursing,” said Cooper.

“HSN’s policies and procedures are the most sophisticated and comprehensive that I have seen, and a lot of other hospitals are now building their policies based on HSN’s. It’s amazing for them to share their knowledge,” said Tai.

Clinicians can also include photos, videos, diagnostic images and documents with their Hypercare messages. It could be a photo of a wound that’s sent to a dermatologist, for example, or an emergency doc sending a photograph of a patient’s burn to a plastic surgeon.

To ensure privacy, users click on a camera icon within the Hypercare app, so the photo is saved in Hypercare – not stored on the cell phone’s photo reel.

Ontario Health Teams may be eligible for funding from the province to cover the cost of a Hypercare deployment as the application has been identified by the Ontario Centre of Innovation as a solution capable of improving their operations.

To date, Hypercare has been deployed by 30 hospital systems in Ontario representing 20 percent of hospitals in Ontario, including Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto, Royal Victoria Regional in Barrie, Southlake in Newmarket, Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington, and the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance in southwestern Ontario. Other deployments are in the works across Canada and the U.S.

Feedback from HSN staff has been extremely positive, said Cooper. “It was exciting to see clinical team members’ eyes light up when they started playing with the app. I can remember onboarding a nurse and watching her message a physician she was working with. Within seconds she received a response and looked at me in disbelief. Real-time communication and collaboration was something they never had before when using pagers.”