Brad Brooks, CEO , TigerText For the past couple of years, many healthcare organizations have started to take innovative steps towards rebuilding their communication workflows. Emerging forms of communication such as text messaging mark this shift to alternative technologies from traditional ones, like email and phone, which create dramatic inefficiencies in the healthcare delivery system by forcing clinicians and care teams to coordinate and interact with patients using tools that are not mobile-friendly.
Moreover, emerging technology shifts brought on by Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in the workforce has created an urgency for healthcare organizations to look at newer communication tools. Many times these efforts are impeded by concerns over security. “Hospitals are softer targets for hackers and cyber attacks as they possess critical information and healthcare records,” says Brad Brooks, CEO, TigerText. “And it is driving healthcare organizations to take cautious steps by bolstering security around their communication technology.” This is where TigerText comes in, fortifying the workflows that makes healthcare run with a secure, real-time messaging application that is built to scale. Headquartered in Santa Monica, CA, the company’s cloud based platform offers a high degree of control over users and provides the ability to set and enforce stringent security policies.
As a cloud-based technology, TigerText’s platform ensures the uptime of an organization in mission-critical situations—from disruptive events like networking and power failures to hacking attacks. Many IT organizations have embedded TigerText into their critical incident alerting processes and procedures to ensure fast and effective responses.
In the quest to protect patient information, a new opportunity has emerged by linking disparate systems such as EMRs, PACS systems, scheduling apps, and paging services, which until now have existed in their own silos as separate applications using a desktop-based delivery model.
We want to play a greater role in helping physicians and nurses by facilitating the flow of information and increasing the quality of healthcare services
This is an enormous limitation to place on a workforce that spends most of their time at their feet. Providing in-stant access to these data sources using a single smartphone app like TigerText, it suddenly trans¬forms the delivery of care by cutting out workflow redundancies and shifting the focus back to patient wellness. “By consolidating information into one app, we save users from constantly jumping in and out of different systems, since everything lives within TigerText,” says Brooks.
High-quality healthcare requires a coordinated effort from numerous departments and roles. TigerText addresses this need with its group messaging module that stands as an important source of assistance for physicians and nurses. Group messaging allows nurses to share information all at once with the relevant members of the care team, rather than tracking individuals down one at a time.
In one instance, Waterbury Hospital approached TigerText to integrate with their EHR Platform to speed the flow of information. The hospital needed an easy-to-integrate app to receive exam reports, test results, and critical alerts in real-time on their mobile devices. After implementing TigerText, Waterbury’s care coordination improved significantly and was estimated to help save the hospital nearly $1 million.
Through a coordinated outreach, TigerText has adopted a ‘voice-of-the-customer’ approach that is woven into the structural fabric of every process at TigerText. “This approach is about paying close heed to the customers’ demands and evolving needs, and building features that match,” says Brooks. “We want to play a greater role in helping physicians and nurses by facilitating the flow of information and increasing the quality of healthcare services,” concludes Brooks.
