Will social media banish the bleep? An analysis of hospital pager activity and instant messaging patterns.
Will social media banish the bleep? An analysis of hospital pager activity and instant messaging patterns.
Pagers or ‘bleeps’ have been used for intra-hospital communication for over 30 years but are time inefficient and antiquated. We compared pager activity with instant messaging patterns over a 6-month period in a large, UK, teaching hospital. We found that instant messaging was widely used for clinical communication, yet the introduction of an intra-hospital instant messaging platform only led to a modest reduction in pager activity, suggesting that phasing-out of pagers will require a managed transition to alternative messaging technologies. Social network analysis from instant messaging logs also provided insight into patterns of communication that could be used to optimise clinical care.
communication, hospital medicine, information technology, management
Fuggle, Nicholas R.
9ab0c81a-ac67-41c4-8860-23e0fdb1a900
Harrison, Helen
34de4341-d09e-41f1-a8d9-e2c52ecfc03d
Macarthur, Benjamin
2c0476e7-5d3e-4064-81bb-104e8e88bb6b
26 March 2021
Fuggle, Nicholas R.
9ab0c81a-ac67-41c4-8860-23e0fdb1a900
Harrison, Helen
34de4341-d09e-41f1-a8d9-e2c52ecfc03d
Macarthur, Benjamin
2c0476e7-5d3e-4064-81bb-104e8e88bb6b
Fuggle, Nicholas R., Harrison, Helen and Macarthur, Benjamin
(2021)
Will social media banish the bleep? An analysis of hospital pager activity and instant messaging patterns.
BMJ Open Quality, 10 (1), [e001100].
(doi:10.1136/bmjoq-2020-001100).
Abstract
Pagers or ‘bleeps’ have been used for intra-hospital communication for over 30 years but are time inefficient and antiquated. We compared pager activity with instant messaging patterns over a 6-month period in a large, UK, teaching hospital. We found that instant messaging was widely used for clinical communication, yet the introduction of an intra-hospital instant messaging platform only led to a modest reduction in pager activity, suggesting that phasing-out of pagers will require a managed transition to alternative messaging technologies. Social network analysis from instant messaging logs also provided insight into patterns of communication that could be used to optimise clinical care.
Text
Will text help to ban the bleep Manuscript 21_1_26 (clean)
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 4 February 2021
Published date: 26 March 2021
Additional Information:
Funding Information:
This study was funded by Dunhill Medical Trust (RTF1806\35).
Keywords:
communication, hospital medicine, information technology, management
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 448698
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/448698
PURE UUID: 7b68e515-862b-4e43-a6f3-6df44f6a93d1
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Date deposited: 30 Apr 2021 16:32
Last modified: 06 Jun 2024 02:04
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Author:
Helen Harrison
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