Mercy Iowa City Selects Spok Go® to Enhance Patient Care and Simplify IT Complexity

Acute care hospital to extend cloud-native communication platform enterprise wide for secure care team coordination

SPRINGFIELD, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Spok, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Spok Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPOK) and a global leader in healthcare communications, today announced that Mercy Iowa City has chosen the Spok Go® communication platform to streamline critical communication workflows that support patient care. With 194 acute care beds, Mercy Iowa City is a regional referral center that serves patients throughout southeast Iowa. The organization is an affiliate of MercyOne, which is jointly operated by CommonSpirit Health System and Trinity Health.

One of the healthcare system’s major ongoing initiatives is to reduce IT complexity and improve the user experience for clinicians and staff. Spok Go will be a major component of the organization’s ability to roll out its next-generation communication strategy and standardize workflows.

A goal of this IT strategy is to build on platforms and minimize disparate systems and point solutions. This lowers costs and improves efficiency through integrated solutions that work well with other platforms like the EHR. “Our plan is to maximize our selected systems to create a highly efficient, high-performance, low-cost ecosystem. Spok will be a key part of this approach,” said Scott Alderman, Chief Information Officer, Mercy Iowa City. “We’ve entrusted our critical healthcare communications to Spok for more than a decade, and they continue to provide us with exceptional solutions, service, and support. After reviewing the options available, we unanimously selected Spok Go for our clinical communications due to the nicely integrated platform model.”

Spok Go brings together solutions for operator console, on-call scheduling, web directory, secure mobile messaging, emergency notification, call recording, and paging. Through EHR integration, Spok Go delivers mobile alerts with actionable clinical context to providers to help inform treatment decisions. Mercy Iowa City and Spok will begin the first phase of the hospital’s long-term initiative this year by rolling out Spok Go for secure messaging and paging. These capabilities will incorporate directory and on-call scheduling information to ensure messages reach the right provider or staff member quickly.

“The pandemic has shown us just how important it is to have reliable and secure messaging,” said Vincent D. Kelly, president and chief executive officer of Spok Holdings, Inc. “We look forward to supporting Mercy Iowa City’s ongoing commitment to excellence in patient care and seeing how Spok Go will enable the organization to achieve its communication goals.”

About Mercy Iowa City

Mercy Iowa City is an acute care hospital and regional referral center for southeast Iowa. Mercy has received: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) 5 Star Rating as a Top 2% of all hospitals for the 4th consecutive year, the only hospital in Iowa to do so; the Fortune IBM/Watson Health 100 Top Hospital ranking; the Fortune IBM/Watson Health 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospital ranking; the accredited Chest Pain Center with the American Heart Association Gold Plus Achievement Award for Stroke Care; the Top 100 Community Hospitals Award in 2018 and 2019 from Becker’s Review; the Press Ganey Guardian of Excellence Award for Mercy’s Emergency Care Unit by achieving 95 percent for patient experience for 13 consecutive years; and the Center of Distinction Award from Healogics for Mercy’s Wound and Vein Center. Mercy has 194 acute care beds, 25 private rooms for outpatient surgery, a 26-bed nursery with Level II Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, 28 primary and specialty care clinics, a medical staff of 250 physicians representing all major medical specialties and most subspecialties, and 1,350 employees. It was founded by the Sisters of Mercy in 1873 and became an affiliate of MercyOne in 2017. To learn more visit www.mercyiowacity.org.

About Spok

Spok, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Spok Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPOK), headquartered in Springfield, Virginia, is proud to be a global leader in healthcare communications. We deliver clinical information to care teams when and where it matters most to improve patient outcomes. Top hospitals rely on the Spok Go® and Spok Care Connect® platforms to enhance workflows for clinicians and support administrative compliance. Our customers send over 100 million messages each month through their Spok® solutions. When seconds count and patients’ lives are at stake, Spok enables smarter, faster clinical communication. For more information, visit spok.com or follow @spoktweets on Twitter.

Spok is a trademark of Spok Holdings, Inc. Spok Go and Spok Care Connect are trademarks of Spok, Inc.

Contacts

Katlyn Nesvold

+1 (952) 230-5584

Katlyn.Nesvold@spok.com