A Lifetime of Industry Related Writing
Article Repository Consolidates Industry Resources
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
I published my first article in 1982. It was about pagers. Remember them?
It was also the hardest piece I’ve ever written, but it set me on a journey for a lifetime of writing. Over the years I authored a couple thousand articles, some of which have been forever lost, but most are still available online. And I’ve written even more blog posts. That’s millions of words.
I write a lot about the telephone answering service and call center industries. Each year I publish twelve columns for TAS Trader and another six each for Connections Magazine, AnswerStat, and Medical Call Center News. That’s thirty new pieces of industry related content each year, with over 500 in total.
You can go to the respective publication websites to read these articles, but now they’re all compiled into one convenient repository for easy access. Please bookmark this page for future reference.
The articles are also grouped by category. This allows you to quickly drill down to your area of interest: answering service, call center, and healthcare call center. They are also cross indexed by specific topics. There are 100 articles about telephone answering service, 200 addressing the call center industry, and nearly 200 covering healthcare call centers. In addition, I have posted 130 business related articles and over 600 about writing and publishing.
Now, for the first time ever, these are accessible for you at one location. Altogether I’ve posted more than 1,400 articles that I’ve written over the years.
In addition to them being online, I will compile and update the best, most relevant articles for upcoming books. With a dozen book title ideas in mind, I’m already working on the first one. The working title is Customer Service Success Stories. I’ll let you know when it’s available.
My next title will cover the telephone answering service industry. I think I’ll call it The Best of TAS Trader. I can’t wait to share it with you.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader. Check out his latest book, Sticky Customer Service.
Healthcare Communications
By 1Call
Though pagers are still a highly used communication tool in the healthcare industry, hospitals that use pagers are at risk of data breaches, financial loss, and communication inefficiencies, which can lead to wasted time and, in some cases, the loss of lives.
Under HIPAA regulations, hospitals still using pagers are prohibited to send any protected health information (PHI) via a pager, unless the messages are encrypted and the identity of the user can be verified. If PHI needs to be communicated, the individual must call to relay that information over the phone. Such inefficient communications result in wasting billions of dollars every year.
Upgrading to a secure messaging platform that utilizes end-to-end encryption can ensure PHI, in the form of text, photo, video, or audio, remains secure and hospital staff communicates quickly and effectively all via your personal or company-provided device. This eliminates the need to call and relay information over the phone.
Because one-way pagers can only receive messages, recipients are unaware of who is contacting them, the reason, and the level of urgency, which can lead to issues with prioritization and wasted time to gain more information. According to a study by the Ponemon Institute, it was determined that hospital-based physicians and nurses waste 46 minutes a day on average by using pagers and beepers.
To combat inefficient communication, secure messaging platforms allow users to send end-to-end encrypted messages instantly to individuals or groups within their healthcare teams. Unlike traditional pagers, messages are marked with timestamps to ensure accountability among team members and show when messages are delivered, read, completed, and deleted. In addition to fast and efficient instant messaging, these new apps can allow users to set their status—at lunch, in a meeting, in/out of office, making rounds, and so forth—to further prevent wasted time.
Just as technology continues to evolve, the future of healthcare communication will as well, providing a more efficient and secure solution for healthcare teams. We have already begun to see the shift from pagers to secure messaging platforms in the United Kingdom, as the Health and Social Care Secretary of the National Health Service has ordered the removal of pagers for non-emergency communications by the end of 2021.
Classified Ads:
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Industry News
Sorry, we have no new news to share with you this month.
Send us your TAS articles and news for consideration in the next issue.
Quotes for the Month
“I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.” –Duke Ellington
“Every exit is an entry somewhere else.” -Tom Stoppard
“When an actress saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she’d dye.” -unknown