Evaluating Spok Alternatives

With clinical communication and collaboration systems replacing pagers across the healthcare sector, teams must invest in a solution that will enhance patient care across the continuum. These systems are essential for reducing response times to patient events as they ensure the swift delivery of critical alerts that effectively mobilize care teams to the situation.

Many healthcare teams utilize Spok for these types of clinical communications due to its secure messaging capabilities and enterprise directory, however there are numerous solutions on the market that teams must consider before investment. 

In this blog, we will identify and evaluate replacements for Spok to assist your team in the search for the perfect clinical communication solution. We will analyze the tools below: 

• • Spok
  • OnPage
  • Vocera
  • American Messaging
  • TigerConnect

Spok

If your team is looking for replacements for Spok, you may already be tuned into their value offerings. But, just in case you’re not, we will get into those and uncover why some teams may be looking for an alternative solution. 

Spok is a clinical communication and collaboration tool that enables teams to securely communicate via their phone application and manage on-call schedules. 

Below are some of Spok’s features:

• HIPAA-compliant messages and attachments for improved communication and collaboration.
• Centralized directory enabling teams to deliver messages to the right on-call care team members.
• On-call scheduler that allows teams to maintain their schedules in a single location across all departments.
• Integrations with Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to ensure seamless communication between health systems.

Spok is a great easy-to-use solution for healthcare professionals that can be used to enhance clinical communications. However, when looking into this tool, we found that users often report facing technical issues, with one G2 user describing how the application sometimes lags, resulting in delayed response to patients. Plus, as reported on Google Play store reviews, the app is often unreliable, with users not receiving pages or pages failing to make sound. And as technology advances, clients have begun expecting seamless service delivery, so when analyzing these alternatives this is something to keep in mind. 

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 Spok, 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, 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. 

American Messaging

American Messaging’s AMS Connect, is a critical messaging application used by healthcare teams to securely facilitate peer-to-peer communications. This solution also enables providers to deliver messages from their smartphones to a pager device. 

So, for teams utilizing both pagers and mobile phones this might be a good solution. However, we wanted to note that during our research, we found some users complaining about poor customer support, and the solution has limited integrations that may result in fragmented communications. 

TigerConnect

TigerConnect is a unified tool that enables care teams to securely collaborate and improve their workflows on their mobile device. This is a widely known solution used by numerous healthcare organizations. TigerConnect may be overkill for some teams though, and their contracts aren’t as flexible as some of the other alternatives mentioned in this blog. So, for teams looking to quickly scale operations this solution may not be the best fit. 

Conclusion

Choosing the right clinical communication and collaboration tool is essential to the success of a care team’s coordination. So, teams must identify their needs and carefully select a solution accordingly. All of these tools have offerings that may benefit specific use cases, so at the end of the day, the most important question is – have you comprehensively evaluated the needs of your care team?

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