• Bazoogle@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    An easy answer is pagers in hospitals. I know it’s because they’re simple RF technology, and work reliably in cinderblock buildings. But given how advanced so much of our medical equipment is, you’d think there would be a different system. Granted, that system would almost definitely need updates and have potential downtime/crashes, which you cannot afford in that kind of environment

    • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 hours ago

      There was a good episode of Planet Money where they interviewed some doctors who were trying to get rid of beepers at their hospital. Basically during testing, it was found that when using an app to send messages to doctors, it was almost too simple and non critical messages were being sent to doctors. This was creating a lot of noise and causing them to be overwhelmed and ignoring the notifications on the phone. It seemed as though the clunkyness of paging someone was a feature so that doctors on call were actually getting relevant information.

    • spittingimage@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Some telcos are willing to guarantee that pager messages will arrive. No-one’s willing to guarantee shit for mobile phones.

      • Bazoogle@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        The one I worked at was a very large modern university hospital (in the US) that handled a large part of the states patients. We used pagers in the Emergency Room for code red patients. Many doctors also still use them