Children's Hospital Colorado saved $220,000 in device costs when it got rid of pagers in favor of a secure messaging system through Epic, the EHR vendor reported recently.
After the Aurora, Colo., hospital determined that paper schedules for on-call providers and pager messaging were harming the quality of its communications, it integrated its on-call schedule with its Epic EHR and replaced pagers with Epic's Secure Chat, the company said in the July 25 report.
A team of clinicians, administrators and informaticists led by chief medical information officer Patrick Guffey, MD, and clinical informatics director Emily Reyes, RN, helped design the new system, which also uses the third-party workforce scheduling app QGenda.
Nurses who need urgent, nonemergency assistance from a physician can now identify who is on call and message the provider from the patient's bedside, while the physician can access the patient's EHR via the messaging device — either a mobile device or desktop.
Since starting the initiative, the hospital has eliminated more than 95 percent of its pagers, leading to cost savings, the report found.