Widespread outage disturbs healthcare operations

Many hospitals across the US experienced phone issues due to a nationwide outage from various cellular carriers. Hopefully, the outage did not impact patient safety and care. Health systems can utilize this outage to think about alternative solutions for communications with their patients and providers.

Step up the social game

We live in an omnichannel world and our communication mechanism should also adapt. Healthcare organizations need to ramp up their usage of social media as another communication tool. Approximately, 55% of Americans get their news from social media in a research conducted by Pew Research Center. Utilize your company’s Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to share updates with the community while holding private chat for personalized communication with specific customers or patients.

Alternative Messaging

This was a tweet sent by the President of Technology at Tmobile encouraging the use of alternative messaging services during the cellular network’s outage.

I found this to be very useful but it is not practiced at the enterprise level in healthcare. There is an opportunity for non-PHI communication using the alternative messaging service. Does your health system have a platform to work with solutions like WhatsApp, Signal, and others? I definitely recommend looking into these options.

Adopt Internal One to Many Communication Solutions

The outage today made me reflect on how health systems can use tools such as Facebook at Work, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and other enterprise-level collaboration tools to communicate the outage. Instead, most communication was transmitted by a mass email. The scenario today would have been a perfect use case for embracing the enterprise collaboration tool, unfortunately, adoption is slow in healthcare.

How were you impacted by the situation and did you have a creative way to communicate?