Kathy Mealer: My name's Kathy Mealer and I'm the manager of telecommunications in the IT service desk for West Tennessee Healthcare in Jackson, Tennessee. It serves all of West Tennessee. The flagship is a Jackson-Madison County General Hospital. That's a 635-licensed bed facility and serves the 17 county area, and it also has six centers of excellence. And we also have three rural hospitals, small rural hospitals, fifteen sports plus rehab clinics, six cardiology clinics, and fourteen primary care clinics, as well as a mental and behavioral health component. Well I think really the whole journey was driven by the HIPAA requirements, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for secured messaging. We were using a middleware and not sending messages in a secured fashion, you know, using copy and paste and that sort of thing. So, we needed to kind of reel that in.
And we started looking at all the tools that were available on the market, and there were literally hundreds of them. So, we kind of nailed it down to five and what we thought looked like the five best and the best fit for our organization. And we created a vendor comparison grid. And then we created a team of people to look at all these products. So we went through that whole process and everything that was on our grid Amtelco's miSecureMessages met all those requirements. That's how we selected. We've got 1,200 licensed users today. Two-way communication is always better. Before, they would send the page out, have to wait for the doctor to take time to call them back. And then he'd call back into the operators and they'd have to get him to the right place, so, you know, you could have some serious time delays there. This way we are going straight from nurse to physician, so, you know, anytime you improve that, you can improve patient care at the same time.
We had a lot of support from upper administration, and we had a lot of champion support and that really helped us. And I think really the ones that are using it today seem to like it. And the nurses, they took to it pretty easy. We hope to be part of the big picture. We hope to add modules. We're going to add the Infinity product this year. And hopefully, MergeComm the next. We see a good long future with all of this.
