Evaluating TigerConnect Alternatives

In the healthcare sector, quick response times can be the difference between life and death. So, care teams must have structured methods in place to ensure swift response to patient emergencies. These plans require robust communication solutions that enable doctors to securely communicate patient needs and results. And as more tools penetrate the market, teams must evaluate their options to ensure that they are investing in the tools that will ensure their success. 

One popular tool for clinical communication and collaboration among healthcare teams is TigerConnect. It 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 limitations posed by TigerConnect. 

So, if your team is the market for tools that will improve clinical communication and collaboration and enhance patient response, then you have come to the right place! In this blog, we will discuss several TigerConnect alternatives and their features to help your team choose the right solution for their needs. We’ll evaluate the following tools: 

• TigerConnect
• OnPage
• Spok
• Vocera
• American Messaging

TigerConnect 

Of course, before getting into the alternatives, we will examine the TigerConnect solution to understand their features and why customers may be seeking out other alternatives. 

TigerConnect is a comprehensive, HIPAA-compliant clinical communication and collaboration platform that supports messaging, voice call, and video calls. 

Below are some of TigerConnect’s features: 

• Securely deliver messages on TigerConnect’s HIPAA-compliant platform, ensuring PHI is protected.
• Integrations with Electronic Health Records (EHR) for seamless communication between health systems. 
• Create pre-defined teams based on roles for swift and effective collaboration during patient events. 
• Develop digital physician schedules to ensure that the right on-call person is contacted when necessary. 

While these features can be great for large healthcare organizations, we found reviews expressing that some teams face contract limitations that reduce their ability to quickly scale their capacity up or down, forcing them to face high switching costs. Additionally, TigerConnect does not have the ability to integrate with popular chat-based applications including Microsoft Teams and Slack, where other clinical communication and collaboration platforms, like OnPage, do. 

OnPage

To kick off the alternatives, we want to discuss our own solution, OnPage. OnPage enables care teams to securely deliver urgent alerts to the right on-call physician every time. With the OnPage application, healthcare teams can unify fragmented, siloed communication and ensure critical events rise above the clutter to reduce readmission risks and improve patient outcomes. 

OnPage improves care team coordination by enabling providers to deliver high-quality, patient-centered care. 

Below we will share the benefits that OnPage offers in addition to the basic clinical communication and collaboration features: 

• 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. 
• Role-Based Alerting: 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 Dedicated Lines and Live Call Routing capabilities powered by OnPage’s automation and alerting, patients can access their on-call physician. This significantly improves a patient’s 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 TigerConnect, praising OnPage’s ability to integrate practically any solution out there through webhooks, API and email. 

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.

Vocera

Vocera is a company that provides communication and workflow solutions designed for healthcare environments. They offer both a smartphone application as well as wearable communication devices so that care teams can securely communicate during patient events. 

The solution also effectively integrates with EHR systems for interoperability. Although, one of the downsides to Vocera is their limited scheduling capabilities making it hard for teams to have a centralized platform for all of their clinical communication and collaboration needs.

American Messaging

American Messaging provides critical messaging through their AMS Connect application to companies in the healthcare industry. Providers can receive critical messages along with facilitating peer-to-peer communications via the smartphone app. Plus, they can deliver messages from their smartphone directly to the recipient’s pager device to ensure communication across multiple devices.  

However, when analyzing this solution, we came across disgruntled user reviews describing inadequate customer support. Additionally, they do not offer as many integrations with health systems in comparison to the other TigerConnect alternatives, diminishing the ability for teams to seamlessly communicate across different platforms. 

Conclusion 

At the end of the day, care teams must invest in technologies that align with their needs and long-term goals. So, it is important to closely evaluate all of your options and decide which solution will complement and improve your clinical communication and collaboration plans. And, as you look at TigerConnect alternatives it is important to note that all of these options offer their own unique features and benefits and may be best suited to deliver value in certain use cases.

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