Why do doctors still use pagers?

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Remember pagers? They were huge in the 80s — these little devices that could receive short messages. Sir Mix-A-Lot even had a song about them! But then cell phones came along, and pagers more or less became obsolete.

Except there's one group of people who still carry pagers: medical doctors. At a surprisingly large number of hospitals, the pager remains the backbone of communication. Need to ask a doctor a question? Page them. Need to summon a doctor to an emergency? Page them. And then... wait for them to call you back.

Almost everyone agrees that pagers are a clunky and error-prone way for doctors to communicate. So why do so many hospitals still rely on them?On today's show: A story about two doctors who hatched a plan to finally rid their hospital of pagers. And the surprising lessons they learned about why some obsolete technologies can be so hard to replace.

This episode was hosted by Jeff Guo and Nick Fountain. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Keith Romer and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez with help from Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ho, ho ho! Santa here coming to you from the North Pole, where the Elves in our
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0:26.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:31.0	For a lot of young doctors starting out their careers, there comes this special moment when you start to feel like a real person of medicine.
0:39.0	This rite of passage happens after you've graduated from medical school when you start
0:43.4	working in a hospital and they hand you this this thing it's almost like a
0:47.4	historical artifact so it's a little black box a little gray screen in it and it emits a sound to alert you that you have a message.
0:55.6	Mary Mercer is an emergency room doctor in California and yes she is talking about
1:01.2	the pager. Can you just help me understand what is this sound?
1:05.0	So it's like,
1:07.0	something like that.
1:09.0	Oh my gosh.
1:10.0	Mary got our first pager when she started her residency training in 2007.
1:15.0	She says the sound of your first pager, it gets seared into your soul.
1:20.0	The baa, baa, baa goes off.
1:22.6	A number pops up on your pager screen and you race to find a phone to call that number back.
1:27.6	To this day, at a lot of hospitals, pagers are how doctors get summoned when someone needs their help.
1:34.0	Now there was a time when Pagers were everywhere.
	...

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