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Innovations in Health Care Delivery
January 5, 2016

Reimagining Electronic Clinical Communication in the Post-Pager, Smartphone Era

Author Affiliations
  • 1Division of Hospital Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
  • 2Center for Digital Health Innovation, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
  • 3Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
JAMA. 2016;315(1):21-22. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.17025

Communication is the lifeblood of clinical medicine, yet most health care practitioners still use pagers, communication tools developed a half-century ago. Recently, there is increased interest in shifting to smartphone-based communication modalities. Many clinicians use short message service texts directly from their cell phones,1 often in innovative ways,2 and others have supported using secure text messaging applications to avoid violations to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.3,4

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