TigerText to docs: Toss your pagers

There is perhaps no piece of technology more associated with doctors than the humble pager, the shrill and demanding black box that still serves as an essential communication tool, even in an era of cellphones and smartwatches.

But a number of companies are vying to do away with the gadget and bring medicine into the digital age. Pagers provide limited, one-way communication. There's no way of tracking whether someone has received the message. There's also no way to forward the message to someone else or to include attachments, such as images.

“It's just a one-way ping,” said Brad Brooks, CEO of Santa Monica, Calif.-based TigerText, the largest player in this space. “That's just an obvious low-hanging fruit.”

TigerText has more customers in this market than any other company and is the brand most associated with secure messaging platforms, according to an October report from Klas Research.

Its product includes the messaging app for use on smartphones, as well as the TigerConnect platform, which synchronizes with a desktop.

TigerText's messaging platform allows providers to create a network of authenticated users who can share and receive information, including images, audio and video. Users also can forward messages to others in the network. There are do-not-disturb and auto-forward features, so that messages reach whoever is on call during a particular shift.

And the technology can reproduce the experience of a pager—that loud, repetitive beeping that's impossible to ignore—by allowing users to set a priority status for messages.

For security purposes, the data that's transmitted through TigerText reside in the app, not the user's smartphone.

The benefits, TigerText says, also extend beyond a more streamlined communications process. “There's sort of a tendency to deprecate it as, oh, this is just an IT project,” Brooks said. “This is truly a transformative opportunity at a very low cost. There's just an easy, crazy, off-the-charts ROI.”

Pagers themselves are expensive, costing about $9 a month for each device, compared with secure messaging platforms that are less than $5 a month, according to a study that TigerText released last month with HIMSS Analytics, the research arm of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

Pagers also create lags in care, Brooks said. When a physician is paged for a consult, for example, “By the time they come see the patient, there's a tremendous amount of time lost,” he said.

But it's not only lost time that's costing providers money. One of TigerText's clients, an accountable care organization, reduced its readmission rate by 60% by improving communication around patient discharges. Patients are no longer being sent home prematurely or without a care plan in place.

Seton Dell Children's Hospital in Austin, Texas, introduced the TigerText platform more than two years ago after realizing that it needed a common communication platform for all clinical staff, and eventually, allied- health professionals.

The technology replaced the need to have multiple communication devices. “Because it's HIPAA-compliant, we're comfortable using it rather than a personal cellphone,” said Dr. Meena Iyer, Seton Dell's hospitalist director.

Also, unlike a pager, TigerText allows the sender to set a priority level that makes it easier for doctors to triage their messages.

Nurses at Seton Dell liked the technology because it was easier to reach residents. And families were getting answers much faster, reducing their frustration and increasing patient satisfaction scores. “The families feel like everyone is involved,” Iyer said.

The hospital recently put case managers on the TigerText network, which has sped up the turnaround time for placing psychiatric patients in inpatient beds. Seton Dell also plans to expand the technology to respiratory therapists and social workers.

Before starting TigerText, Brooks ran DIC Entertainment, a children's media brand that he acquired in 2000 from Walt Disney with the help of private-equity firm Bain Capital. He founded TigerText with his brother Dr. Andrew Brooks, an orthopedic surgeon who previously started a medical device company called Cardo Medical that was sold to Arthrex in 2011.

The venture-backed company has more than 2,000 active customers, covering 7,000 facilities. The fragmented market also includes Imprivata, Voalte and Doc Halo, according to Klas.

The TigerConnect platform also allows other third-party apps to be integrated into the system. Telemedicine vendors, for instance, can integrate TigerText's technology so doctors receive all their messages through a single portal.