SPOTLIGHT: BlackBerry as a pager replacement

University Health Network in Toronto has replaced the pagers in its clinical inpatient teaching units in general internal medicine with "role-based" BlackBerry smartphones. The BlackBerrys don't belong to individuals, but instead are passed around to on-call residents and nursing shift managers to make sure communications go to the right person. The EMR and clinical decision support systems are integrated with the communications server, too, so the nurse manager or physician on call can get automatic updates whenever there's an abnormal test result or a confirmed case of MRSA in the ED. Article