Spok, announced that Virginia Hospital Center has chosen Spok Care Connect®, a unified healthcare communication platform, to speed response times and improve clinical workflows and quality outcomes.

Virginia Hospital Center is a 394-bed community-based teaching hospital and member of the Mayo Clinic Care Network serving the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

“Two years ago, we decided to invest in a new EHR and now, interoperability is a top priority for us,” said Michael Mistretta, vice president and chief information officer at Virginia Hospital Center. “We started looking for an integrated communication solution to complement the benefits of our EHR and after comparing Spok to other options on the market, we realized no one offered the breadth of capabilities. Without Spok we’d be required to work with several vendors and multiple systems, with no guarantee of achieving the same results.”

The Spok Care Connect platform includes solutions for operator console, on-call scheduling, web directory, secure mobile messaging, emergency notification, call recording, and paging. With over 300 validated integrations with systems that are key to patient care, Spok’s unified platform helps clinicians reach one another around the clock with the information they need.

“Spok Care Connect’s ability to add detailed clinical information to an event with data from the EHR drives faster, more efficient decision-making for providers,” said Hemant Goel, president of Spok, Inc. “We’re looking forward to providing the solutions Virginia Hospital Center needs for a modern technology infrastructure.”

Virginia Hospital Center will partner with Spok over the coming months to improve contact center workflows and eliminate manual processes. The platform’s advanced operator console allows call center staff to initiate a code with a single keystroke and reduce the time it takes for response teams to act. The centralized enterprise directory enables staff to look up contact information anywhere in the hospital, making it easier for mobile staff to collaborate.

Virginia Hospital Center plans for a hospital-wide rollout of Spok’s secure mobile messaging—clinicians will use smartphones to coordinate care and send protected health information (PHI) via the Spok Mobile® application. Clinicians can send messages, such as consult requests and patient updates, images, and videos to smartphones and other devices.