From Pagers to Precision: Transforming Clinical Communication

Healthcare has undergone a remarkable digital transformation over the past decade. Electronic medical records, connected devices, and advanced clinical systems have become standard across many organizations. Yet one critical area of healthcare operations has often lagged behind - communication.

In a recent MUSE Views podcast episode, Dr. Joseph Choi, an emergency physician in Toronto, and the co-founder of Hypercare, shared how firsthand experiences with communication failures revealed a problem that many healthcare organizations continue to face today - not a lack of clinical expertise, but difficulty connecting the right people at the right time.

‍

When Communication Becomes the Bottleneck

As an emergency physician, Dr. Choi regularly works in environments where timely decisions and rapid coordination are essential.

Early in his career, he experienced a situation where an urgent surgical consultation was delayed for hours because a pager failed to deliver the message. In another case, a patient with an acute aortic dissection required multiple calls across different services before the appropriate surgeon could be reached.

The issue wasn't a lack of available clinicians. The expertise was there. The challenge was identifying the right person and reaching them quickly.

These experiences exposed a reality familiar to many healthcare organizations. Critical communication workflows are often supported by a patchwork of pagers, phone calls, shared calendars, spreadsheets, and manual processes that were never designed for today's increasingly complex care environments.

As Dr. Choi noted during the discussion, many safety incidents stem from not knowing who to call, or being unable to reach them when it matters most.

‍

Rethinking Clinical Coordination

Repeated experiences with paging failures, communication delays, and difficulty reaching the right provider inspired the development of Hypercare. What began as a frustration encountered in everyday clinical practice evolved into a mission to improve how healthcare teams communicate and coordinate care more effectively. 

The conversation highlighted three areas where communication breakdowns frequently occur:

Connecting clinicians quickly: care teams need an efficient way to identify and contact the right provider without relying on manual phone trees, outdated schedules, or intermediary steps.

Managing on-call coverage: maintaining accurate on-call information remains a challenge for many organizations. Schedules are often managed through spreadsheets, shared calendars, or administrative processes that can be difficult to update in real time.

Coordinating urgent responses: whether activating a STEMI team, opening an emergency operating room, or escalating an unresolved issue, organizations need a reliable way to bring the right people together quickly.

By bringing secure clinical communication, on-call management, team activation, and escalation workflows into a single platform, Hypercare was designed to reduce friction and help clinicians focus on delivering patient care rather than administrative coordination.

‍

Beyond Faster Communication: Better Care Coordination

Throughout the podcast, Dr. Choi emphasized that improving communication ultimately helps improve the delivery of care, leading to stronger patient outcomes.

In acute care settings, streamlined coordination can help accelerate urgent workflows and reduce delays during time-sensitive events. He shared examples of organizations using Hypercare to support cardiac catheterization programs, improve response times for STEMI activations, and expand specialized services while maintaining performance standards.

The discussion also explored opportunities beyond the hospital setting. One example involved connecting primary care providers, community care teams, specialists, and hospital-based clinicians to support patients without automatically directing them to the emergency department. By enabling real-time communication between providers, organizations were able to coordinate care more effectively and help patients access the right level of support at the right time.

Dr. Choi also described how improved coordination can support patients after discharge by connecting hospital teams, home care providers, community services, and paramedic partners. The goal is simple: help patients remain safely supported in the community while reducing unnecessary hospital utilization.

‍

What's Next for Clinical Communication?

Looking ahead, Dr. Choi believes the future of clinical communication will be shaped by two key priorities: interoperability and intelligent workflow support.

Healthcare organizations increasingly rely on multiple systems, from electronic medical records and bedside monitoring platforms to alerting systems and diagnostic technologies. Ensuring these systems work together and deliver information to the right person at the right time remains a critical objective.

The conversation also touched on the growing role of artificial intelligence. Rather than generating more notifications, AI has the potential to help clinicians manage information more effectively by highlighting priorities, reducing noise, and summarizing complex conversations so providers can act more quickly.

For healthcare organizations facing staffing pressures, increasing patient complexity, and rising operational demands, these capabilities could play an important role in supporting more efficient and coordinated care.

‍

From Fragmentation to Coordination

The central message from the conversation was clear: communication is not simply an operational function. It is a critical enabler of care delivery.

When clinicians can quickly identify the right provider, share information efficiently, and coordinate responses without delay, organizations are better positioned to improve both operational performance and patient care.

The future of clinical communication is not about adding more technology. It is about making coordination easier, faster, and more reliable for the teams delivering care every day.

‍

Listen to the Full Conversation

Hear Dr. Joseph Choi discuss the challenges, opportunities, and future of clinical communication in healthcare by listening to the full MUSE Views podcast episode here: https://bit.ly/43GOujh 

‍

Ready to See the Impact for Yourself?

Learn more about how Hypercare is transforming clinical communication and coordination, click to book a demo.

‍