At a surprisingly large number of hospitals, the pager remains the backbone of communication. The Planet Money team tries to understand why the pager has been so hard to replace.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Remember the pager? Well, to this day, at many hospitals, doctors still communicate using the seemingly outdated piece of technology. Jeff Guo from our Planet Money podcast recently tried to understand why.
JEFF GUO, BYLINE: A long, long time ago – well, not that long ago – there was this device called a pager. Some people call them beepers.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “BEEPERS”)
SIR MIX-A-LOT: (Rapping) How does Mix-A-Lot communicate? With beepers, baby. Beepers…
GUO: Yeah, OK, pagers were huge in the ’80s, but the cellphone kind of made the pager obsolete because most pagers only receive messages. You can’t actually text anyone back.
CHRISTOPHER PEABODY: It’s a one-way communication pathway, all right?
GUO: Dr. Christopher Peabody – people call him Toph. He’s an emergency room physician at San Francisco General Hospital, and he says pagers cause all kinds of problems for doctors trying to get in touch with each other.
PEABODY: So the classic thing is, like, I never got the page, you know? Where were you? I never got the page.
GUO: And look, Toph has heard all the classic arguments for why hospitals still use pagers to this day.
PEABODY: You can throw them in the toilet. You can drop them. And they run on a double a battery – OK? – like, forever. And they’re cheap. They’re like the cockroaches of communication.
GUO: Also, pagers get better service. They run on different wireless networks than cell phones, so they’re more reliable in an emergency. Nevertheless, a few years ago, Toph and his colleague, Dr. Mary Mercer, tried to get their fellow doctors to switch to a more modern way to communicate – try to get them to use texting. They ran a little pilot program at their hospital.
One of the nice things about texting is that you can…
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