Mobile workers in healthcare and their information needs: are 2-way pagers the answer?

The ability to have access to information relevant to patient care is essential within the healthcare environment. To meet the information needs of its workers, healthcare information systems must fulfill a variety of functional requirements. One of these requirements is to define how workers will interact with the system to gain the information they need. Currently, most healthcare information systems rely on users querying the system via a fixed terminal for the information they desire; a method that is inefficient because there is no guarantee the information will be available at the time of their query and it interrupts their work flow. In general, clinical event monitors--systems whose efficacy relies on the delivery of time-critical information--have used e-mail and numeric pagers as their methods to deliver information. Each of these methods, however, still requires the user to perform additional steps, i.e., log into an information system in order to attain the information about which the system is alerting them. In this paper we describe the integration and use of 2-way alphanumeric pagers in CLEM, the UPMC Health System's Clinical Event Monitor, and how the use of these pagers addresses the information needs of mobile workers in healthcare.