One of the most fun things about writing for NurseWeek is finding stories that are flying under the radar of the mainstream tech and health care press. PagerBox is one such story. My latest story for NurseWeek introduces PagerBox to a wider audience. In addition, here's a sidebar I wrote that NurseWeek couldn't print, but that tells a bit more about PagerBox.
The growth of PagerBox
The home page of PagerBox, at
www.pagerbox.com,
doesn't say “welcome” to strangers. It's busy serving doctors and
nurses, and is otherwise a “need-to-know” place kept mysterious
to increase its security. But within the hospital community,
PagerBox's use is spreading by word of mouth.
Luis Diaz, MD, CEO of PagerBox,
welcomes inquiries from interested hospitals or medical centers of
any size who want a quick, convenient way to be able for staff to
send pages or instant messages to their colleagues, using any Web
browser, needing to reach any device or terminal where the recipient
can read a text message or page.
PagerBox was born in 1999 when Diaz
interned at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Diaz was
frustrated by numeric pagers that did not allow for text messages,
and by phones whose interruptive communications “destroy your day.”
Diaz, now an oncologist at Hopkins, developed PagerBox as a separate
business dedicated to giving doctors and nurses a channel of
non-interruptive communications. “Listening to voice mail takes
time, email is just not practical, so text messaging is really just
the best mode of communications in the actue or subacute hospital
setting,” Diaz says.
“The nice thing is, you walk through
the halls, and you hear people say, PagerBox me. It's kind of nice to
see that take hold.”
In addition to Hopkins and UCSF,
PagerBox is also in use at the University of Texas Southwestern
Medical Center's division of cardiology, and some other large
hospitals who prefer not to be identified, according to Diaz. A
Google search on the term PagerBox turns up a growing number of
health care professionals with PagerBox contacts.
It's ironic that a physician invented
PagerBox, instead of one of the many companies providing data
services to health care. “Solutions existed out there in so many
different manners,” Diaz says. “No one had really put it
together. I don't know why.”
The cost of PagerBox as a service to
hospitals varies based on a variety of factors: the size of hospital,
amount of security required, number of users and level of customer
service. To contact PagerBox, send email to info@pagerbox.com.
