The 5 Ways Secure Texting Can Turbocharge your Workflow January 30, 2018 Tag 1163 Post originally appeared on tigertext.com Healthcare professionals know that every second on the job counts. Physicians' and nurses' time comes at a premium and the goal of every healthcare organization is to maximize face time with patients. On a daily basis, physicians receive hundreds of pages, emails, text messages and phone calls, requiring them to spend valuable time identifying which messages are important and which are not. Compounding the problem is that most organizations have an inefficient communication workflow, forcing healthcare professionals to spend a considerable amount of time chasing each other down. This severely limits the amount of time hospitals have available to spend with patients. Without an easy way to prioritize and receive PHI, organizations are spending too much time on the phone, instead of with patients. Here are 5 ways secure text message confirmations will turbocharge your clinical workflow: 1. Improved Accountability The ability to see the status of your message creates a sense of accountability for both the sender and the recipient. It becomes the responsibility of the sender to make sure that their message is successfully delivered to the recipient's device and then the responsibility of the recipient to read the message and provide a response, as needed. In the healthcare setting, having this accountability is crucial, especially for time-sensitive PHI like prescriptions, lab results and physician orders. The notifications hold both the sending and receiving parties responsible for their message throughout the conversation. 2. Reduced Phone Calls and Eliminated Callbacks Message confirmations significantly help reduce, if not eliminate, phone calls all together. Pagers, and other one-way communication devices, are inherently ambiguous and can leave the sender questioning whether or not their message was actually delivered and read. Message confirmations eliminate all ambiguity. The sender does not need to waste their time making phone calls confirming delivery to the recipient. 3. Increased Staff Reliability Message status notifications make secure texting one of the most reliable forms of communication in healthcare. When you can confirm message delivery to the intended recipient, you trust that your message hasn't gotten lost in transmission. By relying on a single solution in all scenarios, you know that your message has been delivered securely and in compliance with all HIPAA regulations. 4. Prioritized Patient Concerns Message status receipts help create a secure priority channel for communication. Read receipts initiate a faster response rate allowing emergency or immediate communications to be acknowledged instantly, all from the same platform. The average response rate significantly improves with secure texting versus outdated tools such as pagers or email. Healthcare organizations report responses in less than 10 seconds, compared to standard SMS or emails – responses ranging from six minutes to 24 hours. 5. Verified Audit Trail Not only do message confirmations provide workflow benefits for users, secure messaging solutions also give administrators an audit trail to track messages. Archiving capabilities allow administrators to easily verify who received a message, and when they received it. This allows them to monitor usage and further optimize their communication workflow. While there are many ways to communicate within a healthcare facility, specific communication technology choices can have a real impact on an organization's workflow. In many cases, the selection of an efficient communication solution like TigerText can provide a real impact on the productivity of a healthcare organization. Optimized communication frees up time for clinicians and healthcare personnel, so they can spend more time with their most important constituents – their patients. To learn how TigerText helps care teams communicate and coordinate efforts to improve the patient experience, click here.