Evaluating American Messaging Alternatives

Clinical communication and collaboration systems play a key role in reducing response times to patient events by delivering critical alerts swiftly and ensuring that care providers are mobilized to address urgent needs. So, when investing in one of these solutions it is crucial that healthcare organizations thoroughly examine their options and purchase the best tool for their team’s needs.

American Messaging offers a secure text messaging app, AMS Connect, used by hospitals for critical messaging during patient events to facilitate clinical communication and collaboration. This is a great tool for teams looking for a basic secure critical messaging solution, but it has limited integration capabilities that must be considered if your team is looking for enhanced interoperability and more advanced features.

This blog will dive into popular clinical communication and collaboration solutions including: 

• American Messaging
• OnPage
• Vocera
• TigerConnect
• Spok

American Messaging

Firstly, before discussing alternatives, we want to examine American Messaging, its features, and why care teams may be seeking out other clinical communication and collaboration options. 

American Messaging’s AMS Connect application is a HIPAA compliant messaging solution that enables teams to centralize critical and clinical messages on the mobile app. 

Below are some of American Messaging’s features:

• HIPAA compliant messaging for the secure exchange of PHI.
• Deliver messages from AMS Connect directly to another care team member’s pager device.
• Care providers can change their availability status and forward their messages.
• Streamline critical communications through the phone application.

American Messaging is a clinical communication and collaboration application that can be used to securely exchange messages between healthcare professionals. When evaluating this solution however, we came across disgruntled reviews in regards to American Messaging’s customer support quality. Additionally, in comparison to the other solutions we will discuss, American Messaging is limited in their ability to integrate with other critical health systems which could result in fragmented, siloed communications. 

OnPage

The first alternative we will discuss is our very own solution – OnPage. OnPage is a robust clinical communication and collaboration platform that always ensures the secure delivery of high-priority messages to the right on-call team member. Plus, teams can also collaborate via chat threads, gain visibility into their own and team on-call schedules, and initiate critical “pages” all from the OnPage phone application.

This solution is great for teams looking to improve patient response times due to its ability to swiftly route messages to the right on-call doctor based on on-call schedules and escalation policies. 

Some of the benefits your team gains after employing OnPage include:

• Contextual Communication: OnPage enables the delivery of HIPAA-compliant alerts and allows providers to securely add attachments to their messages. This provides doctors with the ability to send and receive contextual messages for more informed decision-making.
• Distinguishable Alerts: Urgent alerts sent via OnPage are distinguishable from your typical mobile push notifications, ensuring that physicians are always immediately made aware of patient events. Additionally, high-priority alerts override the silent switch and Do Not Disturb, ensuring that no critical patient emergency goes unnoticed by on-call teams.
• Automated Role-Based Alert Routing: Critical alerts are routed based on on-call schedules and roles to ensure that the right person is always contacted in the case of an emergency. Teams can create groups and escalation policies to further enhance the effectiveness of their on-call management and rest assured that even in the case of a missed alert, the message will automatically route to the next on-call physician in line.
• Patient-to-Provider Communications: Through Live Call Routing capabilities, patients can call a dedicated line that will immediately route them to the on-call physician. This significantly improves patient care access, facilitates post-discharge patient and family engagement and enables teams to seamlessly deliver round the clock care.
• Digital On-Call Schedules: Use digital on-call schedules to create equitable on-call workloads. Based on schedule configurations, OnPage will only alert the scheduled doctor in the case of an emergency. Plus, OnPage’s scheduler ensures that in the case of a schedule misconfiguration or coverage gap, all doctors are alerted of the situation so that no patient emergency goes accidentally ignored.
• Visibility Into On-Call Schedules: Care providers can gain access to their and their team’s schedules right from the OnPage phone app. This enables more shared knowledge among team members and can support care team collaboration.
• 24/7/365 Customer Support: Gain 24/7/365 access to US-based customer support, including a live chat support on OnPage’s website.

Pricing

Let’s address the elephant in the room: pricing. The vendors discussed in this blog can’t match the value OnPage offers for the price. It’s consistently delivered cutting-edge innovations without increasing prices over the past five years. Unlike other vendors, OnPage maintains transparent pricing and subscription levels. You’ll never receive surprise invoices based on usage; what you agree to upfront is what you’ll pay. Pricing information can be found here: https://www.onpage.com/pricing/ 

Integrations

Additionally, OnPage offers powerful and customizable integrations with EHR systems, Chat Applications (Teams and Slack), and virtually any other critical health system via API, Webhooks, or email. OnPage also supports SSOs and Active Directories from several vendors in the industry. The integrations are not only continually updated to include the latest technology solutions, versions, and capabilities, but are fully supported by our technical support team as well. 

Product Development

We also want to highlight that OnPage is known for its exceptional flexibility when it comes to development requests. Unlike many vendors in the market, we prioritize customer needs and are committed to making meaningful enhancements to our product. If a customer requires a feature that significantly improves their process, we make it a priority in our development pipeline. Rest assured, your requests won’t be ignored – they are thoroughly considered in our weekly product strategy meetings. As OnPage is central to our operations, we consistently update and enhance it, rather than simply maintaining it as a revenue source.

We also frequently receive positive feedback from customers who have transitioned from solutions like American Messaging, praising OnPage’s ability to integrate with practically any solution out there through webhooks, API, and email.

Vocera

Vocera offers multiple types of communication technology for healthcare teams including their phone application, which we will get further into, as well as wearable communication devices – both used to enhance urgent communications during patient events.

These tools can be great for teams looking for a solution that is not connected to mobile devices. Additionally, with these solutions teams can integrate with their EHR to enhance their communication capabilities. But, when evaluating Vocera we found that they lack strong scheduling features, forcing care teams to have more decentralized clinical communication and collaboration. 

TigerConnect

TigerConnect is a unified platform for healthcare teams to securely collaborate and improve workflows. While this is a great solution for many businesses, that may not be the case across all organizations, considering certain contract limitations posed by TigerConnect.

Smaller organizations found it hard to scale their business up or down when using TigerConnect, forcing them to either continue with the number of licenses they had or face high switching costs. So, this is something for growing care teams to think about when they are investing in a clinical communication solution.

Spok

Spok is a communication technology for healthcare organizations to quickly and securely share critical information between care providers. It enables teams to deliver HIPAA-complaint messages, create and maintain on-call schedules, and direct alarms to the correct on-call doctors.

While many doctors enjoy the ease-of-use of this application, they also report experiencing technical issues. One G2 user describes how Spok can lag causing frustration to physicians and resulting in less efficient patient response times. Additionally, a recurring issue highlighted in Google Play store reviews is the app’s unreliability. Customers frequently report not receiving pages or pages failing to produce any sound, a problem that defeats the purpose of carrying a pager in the first place. So, this is something that must be considered when evaluating clinical communication and collaboration options.

Conclusion

Ultimately, care teams need to invest in technologies that align with their needs and long-term goals. Therefore, it’s crucial to carefully evaluate all available options to find the solution that best enhances your clinical communication and collaboration strategies. When considering alternatives to American Messaging, remember that each option has its own unique features and benefits, making them suitable for specific use cases, so you must identify the one that is right for your team.

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