What they want you to know: 10 healthcare leaders on their Spok experience

From day-to-day hospital operations to disaster scenarios, our healthcare customers know Spok is there for them. Listen as 10 Spok customers share their stories about using Spok within their organizations.

You’ll learn how they get the right information into the hands of the right people, take care of patients in need, speed response, and maintain a single, robust process for care team communication. They’ll also share what it’s like to work with Spok on a relationship level and describe what “above and beyond” support looks like.

The overall theme? One vendor that can do it all is the ticket to reaping the benefits of enterprise workflow-driven communications.

Video transcript

Dr. Robert Donnell, Chief Medical Information Officer, Froedtert Hospital & The Medical College of Wisconsin: Having one vendor for my communication solutions has allowed us to provide an enterprise-wide approach, have a single process by which we look to communication.

Christopher Shaw, Director, Clinical Operations, Eastern Maine Medical Center: Spok provides us with the right information in the hands of the right person, being able to provide that information to the patient and family in the right place.

Sean McDaniel, Telecommunication Operations Manager, Arkansas Children’s Hospital: Within our own facility, it gives us the ability to really reach out, connect, make sure that we can page and verify and close the loop, so it’s not just sitting out there saying, “Well we paged them but what happened.” We can tie it back and say yes and when we paged them and said a call was marked here when they called us back we were able to mark that as delivered, close it out, and we know that we’ve taken care of that patient that’s in critical need of our help.

Beth Houlahan, DNP, RN, CENP, Chief Nurse Executive, UW Health Hospitals & Clinics: Probably the most predominant one is Spok Mobile. It’s really aided with our communication platform. We know how important communication is in terms of reducing errors.

Donna Werner, Switchboard Supervisor, Milton S. Hershey Medical Center: The system knows automatically what group to page, so in situations with code blue or pediatric rapid response, the pages go out automatically without operator interference at all.

John Parks, Telecommunication Project Manager/Network Engineer, Franciscan Alliance Health System: It streamlines things in that we don’t have to build things as needed, they’re already built. We can modify those as needed, but it’s really handy to have so much already predefined that we don’t have to worry about at any given instance. Particularly if we’re responding to a disaster recovery situation.

Tracy Roberts, Senior Call Center Manager, Harris Health System: Recently with Hurricane Harvey, our operator office was flooded and our operators had to leave the location immediately. So we had three other PCs set up in our office on our second floor and they were able to go there and work throughout the hurricane, but also the other 15 PCs that were there were relocated there seamlessly. All the equipment worked. All other hospital operations continued with no missed codes, pages—anything.

Trevor Mier, Support Services, Metro Health Hospital: We get feedback on a fairly regular basis from patients who have called in and been appreciative of how much information they were able to find, or how easy it was, providers speaking to the ease of getting paged right through the Spok system. The speed of that allows them to respond not only to code alerts but just the routine consult on the floors.

Andrew Heller, IT Consultant, Orlando Regional Medical Center: Everything’s been above and beyond, with going from our account rep to technical support to management. Everybody has been great. Personally, it’s been the best vendor I’ve ever worked with.

Sean McDaniel, Telecommunication Operations Manager, Arkansas Children’s Hospital: The benefit? I don’t have to keep up with twenty tech support numbers, I don’t have to go “who’s connecting to this through this connector through this other piece?” It’s a one-stop-shop.

John Parks, Telecommunication Project Manager/Network Engineer, Franciscan Alliance Health System: It’s the commonality of support. We know who we’re working with, they know us, so we have a lot of background together. We’ve been longtime customers of Spok and always been well received. The tech support people are very responsive at all hours of the day and night.

Cippy Seidler, Director, Consumer Care Center, Banner Health: There are a lot of advantages to just having one vendor that we’ve selected with Spok. They are aware of what we’re doing and how all the products align, so when we are looking to expand or looking to try new things, they’re able to suggest products to us. They’ve been very involved. When we did our last integration, they were the ones who suggested Messenger product for us to use because they knew our product, they knew what we did, they know how we use it. So that’s a really important relationship that we have.

Dr. Robert Donnell, Chief Medical Information Officer, Froedtert Hospital & The Medical College of Wisconsin: It’s also addressed the previous situation in which we had multiple formats for communicating who is available or when they’re available into a single process, so that our overall efficiency, our overall reliability of our communication tools are now uniform and actually much more robust.