MA-based Social Media Ambassadors Meet OnPage at HIMSS17

Janice McCallum & Judit Sharon, CEO, OnPage at HIMSS17

Matthew Fisher and I, both HIMSS17 Social Media Ambassadors, met with OnPage, a Waltham, MA-based secure messaging company at the HIMSS annual conference. We decided to post a combined blog, reporting from our different perspectives: Matt as a healthcare lawyer with expertise in HIPAA and security; me as a healthcare market strategist and analyst. 

In my pre-HIMSS17 industry perspective article, I wrote how the core IT infrastructure at provider organizations needs a level of enhanced communications services that connects data from EHR and other database systems to build workflow solutions. OnPage represents a good example of the type of enhanced communications service I envisioned.

Judit Sharon, CEO, described how OnPage was a BlackBerry-based secure messaging service that evolved into a cloud-based escalation scheduling service that connects to available on-call physicians.

New opportunities for OnPage arose when telemedicine and other remote care services became more widely used. By providing a fast and reliable means of connecting telemedicine patients to the right clinicians, OnPage has uncovered a winning workflow solution. See this case study on Sage NeuroHospital Management Group for more details.

Matt Fisher & Orlee Berlove, Marketing Director, OnPage at HIMSS17

Matt’s discussions included greater emphasis on privacy and security issues. OnPage recognized fairly quickly that demonstrating satisfaction of HIPAA requirements would be critical to driving adoption. To this end, OnPage determined applicable standards and implemented those requirements into its product.

The ability to securely connect multiple devices is a serious issue within healthcare. Finding tools that can be used on multiple devices is important, especially if those tools can segregate data, since accessed documents automatically saved to a phone is an often overlooked security issue.  A tool like OnPage, which can seamlessly fit into workflow and meet regulatory requirements, is one worth investigating.

To me, OnPage is representative of the evolution of health IT devices and apps from single-purpose tools to workflow productivity services. Matt emphasizes that extra care needs to be taken to protect the security of patient data when new communications services enable the quick and easy flow of information across internal and external networks.