Spok : The Top 10 Spokwise Healthcare Blog Posts of All Time

July 03, 2018

Confession: The Spokwise Healthcare Blog is old in blog years. It turned eight this summer, and our content and readership have grown exponentially in the past few years. It seems like the perfect occasion to look back at our most popular posts of all time.

We dove deep into our web analytics to see which posts have racked up the views and proven to be valuable resources to the healthcare IT community.

The results are in…

The Triple Aim focuses on improving the patient experience, achieving better outcomes, and lowering the cost of care-all patient-centric goals. The Quadruple Aim adds clinician satisfaction to the mix. While the Quadruple Aim certainly isn't Spok's brainchild, our chief medical officer, Dr. Andrew Mellin, adds to the discussion by detailing the role communication plays in clinician satisfaction and poses five questions healthcare leaders should ask themselves about provider communications at their organization.

Why aren't they responding to my message? Why has message delivery failed? These questions can frustrate the average consumer on a regular basis, but they're especially problematic for physicians and nurses who need critical, time-sensitive messages to be reliably delivered and acknowledged. Discover ten ways to combat this issue at your organization.

At the end of each year, we invite Spok leaders and customers to comment on the blog with their thoughts on the year ahead: How will things in healthcare technology shift? What are they most excited about? While this is an annual post, the 2017 edition has proven to be the most popular and continues to generate unique visits 1.5 years later. Get our experts' takes on the trends gaining momentum, as well as what new priorities will seize the spotlight in the coming years.

It came as no surprise to us that this 2016 post made the top 10. Industry insiders are consistently on high alert for any inroads the tech giants (Apple, Amazon, Google, et al) make in healthcare. Our mobility expert dives into the proliferation of Apple devices in hospitals (at the time, nearly 63 percent of physicians were using iPhones or iPads in their daily work) in tandem with the rise of the bring your own device (BYOD) strategy.

Many factors contribute to creating 'holes,' or the potential for errors, in healthcare. When you have too many holes in the 'Swiss cheese', you have the greater potential for small errors to lead to a major event. The primary goal of any safe, reliable communication process is to eliminate those small errors-the holes. Message accountability is a great way to do this, and our CMO, Dr. Andrew Mellin, details four critical components.

Technology is only as effective as the workflow that supports it, and simply implementing a secure messaging application alone is not enough for successful communication and collaboration. Workflows, policies, and procedures must be defined and enforced to ensure your solution is effective, secure, and fully adopted.

Smartphones have virtually taken over as the primary communication device in homes and offices around the world, so why are pagers still being used in hospitals? It seems to be a popular question, given the amount of hits this post has received, and we hope the nuanced answer from our chief information officer, Tom Saine, helps inform the industry. Pagers are much more than most people think, and Tom sets the record straight on the capabilities that only pagers can provide.

Everyone knows that alarm fatigue is a challenge. But what can hospitals proactively do about it? This solution-oriented post comes in at the No. 3 spot, and it's easy to see why it's become a go-to source. Spok interoperability product manager Rob Wilder details eight (!) ways to help diminish the din of alarms throughout your hospital, improve patient safety, and boost clinician satisfaction.

While searching for a topic to write about for National Nurses Week, it struck us that there wasn't one single place where you could learn cool stats about nurses-they all came from disparate sources, such as the Bureau for Labor Statistics or the American Nurses Association. For Nurses Week 2017, we decided to compile ten of the most 'wow' facts about nurses, and it's safe to say others are just as impressed with the profession by the numbers as we were!

By far our most popular post of all time, this blog post is the top Google result for 'history of pagers' and other related searches. As the largest paging provider in the U.S., we're the go-to for anyone seeking information about the pager-how the powerful little device got its start in the world and where and how it's continuing to be used today for reliable communications. Check out this blog to find out more of the evolution of this critical device.

That's a wrap! Which of the top 10 posts was most useful or interesting to you? Which topics have we not covered yet that you would like to see in the second half of 2018? We want to hear from you: Contact us with your suggestions!