As a practicing neurologist, I’ve frequently had to research clinical solutions to help my practice. I vet vendors for everything from syringes to surgical gloves.

In one particular case, I had it narrowed down to two medical device companies (offering EEG systems), both of which had similar feature sets and pricing.

I’m sure either would have served my patients well--they were both solid products. So I decided to focus instead on the vendor’s direction...What did they have in mind for the future of the product and the future of the doctors they serve?

Turns out, the two vendors had philosophies that opposite ends of the spectrum: one was company-driven, the other was customer-driven.

One of the devices was designed by engineers only, while the other was designed by people who actually practiced medicine.

It soon became obvious that only the second company had real insight into what physicians, and therefore their patients, actually needed. They were closer to their clients than the competition. So, of course I ended up going with them.

The BeckonCall Difference

That buying experience got me thinking about how we at BeckonCall set ourselves apart from the mountain of other healthIT products.

A lot of times in healthcare, we get roped into crappy technology made by non-physicians, either because the government mandated us to adopt it or because some out-of-touch administrator fell for the “magic solution”--to increase throughput, decrease average length of stay, and increase profitability--and failed to realize it would make their physician’s lives miserable.

However, there are a few technology products that doctors love. And what’s the difference? It’s the overall experience they’re able to deliver.

The biggest winners always have the doctor’s backs.

And in the world of healthcare, let’s face it: The physician experience has become horrible--we spend more documenting and handling administrative tasks than with our patients, and we’re all burnt out because of it.

So that’s why I wanted to write this, so I could let all of our customers and potential customers out there know:

At BeckonCall, we feel your pain and have your back.

We know firsthand that clinical communication is broken, and that physicians have to deal with too much inefficiency and administrative nonsense just to give the patient the care they deserve.

And many of the administrators who could help alleviate this are only putting bandaids on things with secure messaging solutions, 1-way pagers/pager apps, and answering services (or looking the other way entirely).

Believe me, I’ve been there.

So we want to be the team that helps you do things by your rules. We want to help you make clinical communication physician-first.

Here are the top 3 reasons why we’re the team for the job:

1.                            1. Our DNA

1.                            2. Our Focus
2.                            3. Our Purpose

1. Our DNA

I’ve been practicing medicine for over 20 years.

For years, I’ve had a front-row seat, watching how the clinical communication landscape has been evolving (it really hasn’t much--we’ve been carrying pagers and using answering services since residency).

For years, I’ve been having one-to-one conversations with physicians of all specialties. I’ve been going to practices and hospitals, studying their workflows, and figuring out what their pain points are.

And for years, we’ve been building BeckonCall for these physicians to solve their problems and we’ve been listening to their feedback and refining our solutions--year, after year, after year.

For the team here at BeckonCall, creating tools that help doctors spend more time doing what they signed up for (providing care to patients and finding success in their practice) is part of our DNA.

It wasn’t something we saw just as an opportunity that we could exploit to make $$$. It’s been part of our mission from the beginning.

Every time we hire someone, we take them into the hospital and my practice. They see first-hand what doctor’s pain points are and how current communication tools & processes fail them.

They see how our work at BeckonCall gives these doctors their time back, so they can improve patient outcomes and practice medicine the way they deserve to.

As we’ve grown, we’ve paired our physician-first DNA with Silicon-Valley technology experts, with the know-how to build ‘mission-critical’ software platforms. This means you’ll never worry about the reliability of receiving and responding to urgent clinical communication and your patient’s safety.

Every day, every hire, every feature is a step towards building who we want to be as a company. And we intend to stay, first and foremost, physician-first.

2. Our Focus

Many healthcare technology companies want to be the all-in-one solution for everything.

What might start out as solely your EHR, often ends up offering you telemedicine, secure messaging, and charge capture, all in one. Designed originally for family medicine practitioners, but now with 100 add-on modules for every clinician in a large hospital system!

Sounds great in theory, but usually doesn’t work so well in practice. Instead of focusing on serving the people they’ve already committed to (and who have already committed to them), and making that experience as phenomenal as possible, many healthcare technology companies abandon their roots in pursuit of “the whole pie”.

As a result, the physician experience suffers across the board.

That’s why at BeckonCall, we made the decision to be laser-focused on who we’re building our product for (physicians) and what we want them to do with that product (provide great quality patient care on their terms).

Our focus isn’t on building a practice management solution that will take over your practice and do nothing especially well.

Instead, we’re 100% focused on helping physicians communicate on their terms, so they can provide better, faster care to more patients and not get burnt out. That’s it.

And because we have this focus, we’ve been able to go deep with our solution. We’ve been able to dig into all of the details and use technology to address the pain points that keep physicians up at night (often literally--hello 2 a.m. pages to the wrong doc!).

Giving the physicians the power to immediately know if a page from the hospital warrants a phone call is an example of this.

Currently, physicians are at nurse’s mercy to decide what key information about the patient they’d like to include and the answering service’s mercy to transcribe and page the message out.

Often physicians have trouble understanding the message content and end up spending 5-10 minutes on hold with a nursing station, trying to get the nurse on the phone just to understand the situation. Further, the majority of these interactions only required a 1-word answer in the first place.

Sound complicated and ridiculous? That’s because it is.

With BeckonCall, we made sure that the physician decided what key information the nurse includes with each message (e.g. hospital, room number, patient D.O.B, EMR number, etc.) and that messages are sent in the nurse’s own words.

Once the doctor receives it to the BeckonCall smartphone app, they can respond by whichever means suits them: secure text message or phone call. That way it fits the physician’s workflow and there is never any confusion or wasted time.

3. Our Purpose

Remember your first grade crush?

You knew everything about them. Where they hung out during recess, their pet’s names, what color Power Ranger they liked the most...you get the picture. Your world revolved around them.

At BeckonCall, physicians are our equivalent of a first grade crush.

Every feature we create, every update that we make--revolves around putting the physician-first. We get perspectives and stamps of approval from doctors in practices of all sizes and specialties--and are always looking for feedback from our users so we can get even better.

We will never design the one-size-fits-all solution that impedes your workflow, rather than puts time back into your day.

At BeckonCall, our purpose is, and always will be, to make practicing medicine simpler and more productive for doctors so they can provide great quality of care to their patients.

Closing Thought

Physicians are arguably the most “sold-to” group of people in the world. From pharmaceutical reps, to medical device salesmen, to technology vendors, everyone wants to sell you the next best thing and fix all of healthcare.

We don’t have a fix for that, but next time you’re stuck between two vendors or trying to cut through the B.S., look at where the company came from and what they value.

And above all, make sure they’ve got your back.

See why hundreds of physicians choose BeckonCall to help them communicate about patient care on their terms