Peninsula Regional Medical Center Improves Patient Care Coordination With Spok

Maryland hospital reduces code call activation from minutes to seconds.

SPRINGFIELD, Va. (October 31, 2017) – Spok, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Spok Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPOK) and the leader in healthcare communications, announced that Peninsula Regional Medical Center (PRMC) has improved patient care coordination with Spok Care Connect^®, achieving results in the areas of provider communications, electronic health record (EHR) integration, and emergency response.  PRMC is a 289-bed community hospital with about 3,300 employees, including 400 physicians, in Salisbury, Maryland. An award-winning regional trauma center, PRMC serves over 500,000 patients each year.

“We were looking for a one-stop shop for clinical communications: A single vendor that supports a variety of needs and allows our physicians and nurses to spend more time at the bedside,” said Dr. Chris Snyder, Chief Medical Information Officer at PRMC. “Spok checked all of those boxes, and Spok Care Connect has already helped us realize marked improvements in patient care throughout the organization.”

Spok Care Connect, an enterprise healthcare communications platform, provides secure messaging, paging, mass notification, web directory, on-call scheduling, and contact center solutions that integrate into existing clinical workflows.

Spok Care Connect delivers the right information to caregivers quickly and securely, including sending staff messages and alerts from the EHR. PRMC also embeds Spok on-call scheduling into Epic’s ordering screen to make it easier for physicians to call their colleagues about a case when placing a consult. Spok complements the EHR, streamlining these workflows, which means improved response time for better care coordination and a quieter hospital environment for patients.

Spok Care Connect also supports mass notification for PRMC, which allows them to quickly notify staff—whether it be all staff or a specific group—during emergency events. This technology is used for rallying the rapid response team and activating critical codes. With Spok, PRMC has accelerated processing code blues from several minutes to just seconds.

Key to delivering actionable information is Spok Care Connect’s enterprise-wide directory and on-call schedule that can be referenced by all staff. Real-time updates and communication preferences allow staff to be contacted on whatever device they choose. In the contact center, Spok supports automated operator greetings, which has reduced the number of calls going to operators by 17 percent.

“PRMC has made significant strides in patient care with Spok Care Connect,” said Hemant Goel, president of Spok, Inc. “We’re honored to help them advance patient care today and to support future communication initiatives as they grow.”

Go behind the scenes and watch Spok Care Connect in action at PRMC.

About Peninsula Regional Medical Center
At 289 acute care beds, PRMC is the 8th largest hospital in Maryland, and the region’s largest, most advanced tertiary care facility, which has been meeting the healthcare needs of Delmarva Peninsula residents since 1897.  Its 3,300 physicians, staff and volunteers provide safe, compassionate and affordable care designed to exceed the expectations of the nearly 500,000 patients who rely on the Medical Center team each year for inpatient, outpatient, diagnostic, subacute and emergency/trauma services.

Peninsula Regional Medical Center offers a full range of tertiary services and provides community and population health services through a network of family medicine and specialty care offices across Delmarva, health pavilions in Millsboro, DE and Ocean Pines, MD and with its Wagner Wellness Van.

Keep in touch with PRMC on Facebook at www.facebook.com/PeninsulaRegional, on the PRMC blog at prmcsalisbury.com or on the Peninsula Regional website at www.peninsula.org.