Slugger hits Arizona Victoria ballplayer heads to Chicago Cubs spring training. Page A16
NEWS: Archeology site doesn’t slow bridgework /A5 COMMUNITY: Cattle Point, the urban star park /A7 ARTS: Troubled life feeds hip hop rhythms /A12
SAANICHNEWS Friday, February 22, 2013
Gray Rothnie
250 744 7034
www.graymatters.ca
Connected to More
®
Check us out on Twitter and Facebook and watch for breaking news at WWW.SAANICHNEWS.COM
Separating doctors from their pagers Saanich tech startup aims to revolutionize outdated communication within the medical world
I
n the fall of 2010, Ben Moore paced the halls of Victoria General Hospital as an worry-ridden dad whose newborn daughter was suffering complications. He lived outside of the neonatal intensive care unit for two months, and noticed Edward Hill – as a telecommuniReporting cations engineer and a guy who owned a smartphone – that communication between patients, nurses and doctors seemed unnervingly outdated. He had a lot of questions about his daughter’s condition. The nurse often paged the on-call doctor, and then waited for a call back. Doctors, to Moore’s surprise, still use beepers, a technology that largely vanished from common use a decade ago. “I was in the hospital with an iPad and I couldn’t believe they were trying to page a doctor,” he says. “It caused a lot of frustration and anxiety waiting (for answers).” Moore and his wife emerged from VGH with a healthy child and a nugget of an idea – to replace beepers with smartphonebased system, a device almost all doctors carry anyway.
Edward Hill/News staff
Saanich-based engineers Mike Ferguson and Ben Moore have created a system called SmartPager that allows medical professionals to communicate securely through their smartphones. Outside of Royal Jubilee Hospital, Ferguson shows a typical encrypted text message stream, while Moore shows a pager, a device still widely used by doctors. “Doctors say (pagers) work, that they’re reliable. They love the pager and they work where you can’t get a wireless signal,” Moore says, laughing at what he calls the “page and pray” system – medical staff send a page, and then pray the message gets through. “Ninety per cent of doctors are carrying smartphones, but those aren’t being used for critical communication. Smartphones aren’t secure and they aren’t reliable.” Moore, 37, who attended Claremont secondary before moving to Ontario, where he graduated from Waterloo University, launched the startup company SmartPager with his friend Mike Ferguson, a 30-yearold software engineer who went through Mount Doug secondary, Camosun College and Vancouver Island University. Ferguson hears insider stories of awkward communication flow from his wife, a licenced practical nurse. “(Nurses) could call a pager number and wait for hours,” he says. “Sometimes (my
wife) would call doctors at home, so the doctor would be pestered to no end.” Prying prized pagers from the fingers of doctors might be a tall order, but Moore and Ferguson quickly recognized the lucrative and widespread potential for modern communication within medical fields. They established a base in Saanich at the DataTech Business Centre across from Reynolds high school, and have spent the last year developing the SmartPager app and back-end call centre software. In January, the system launched with a team of surgeons in Phoenix, Ariz. The system allows medical teams to flow confidential patient information, discussion and diagnoses via texts, audio messages, and images on smartphones through a secure cloud network. It can persistently “page” the on-call doctor until the message is read, or flip the query to the next doctor down the chain of command. It can even mimic the beep-beep pager as it exists now for diehard users.
“We want to make communication between patients and doctors as organic as possible, so that it’s effortless to get what you need,” Ferguson says. At the point the light bulb went on in Moore’s head, SmartPager wasn’t viable. Even a few years ago, pager signals could penetrate into the depths of dense hospital buildings, where cellphones networks died. Now almost all hospitals have reliable and widespread WiFi networks. But the backbone of the system is its network security and reliability – SmartPager has to conform with onerous information privacy regulations, called HIPAA in the U.S. and FIPPA in Canada. Creating an app that transmits voicemails, texts and images between smartphones isn’t new, but creating one that meets security thresholds and has 99.999 per cent uptime is a high technical barrier. PLEASE SEE: Paging, unsecured texting, Page A4
NEW LISTING
RE/MAX Camosun
250.744.3301
Victoria’s Referred Realtors
Fairfield Character
Sidney Townhome
Immaculate Walk out Condo
ML319175
MLS 318370
MLS 318455
www.crozierandmarchant.com