“Compared to our other solution, the throughput is much higher because I can push half a million text messages a month, a couple hundred thousand a day, and we get very fast turnaround time so those messages go out very quickly.”
-David Higginson, Chief Innovation Officer at Phoenix Children’s
Overview
Phoenix Children’s adopted texting as a more effective way to reach patients and employees rather than having them log in to an application or a patient portal. They use SignalWire SMS to send one-way text messages with important updates such as lab results as well as two-way communication where doctors can text back and forth with patients. After adopting SignalWire short codes in 2019, they have seen a significant increase in their throughput at a price point disruptive enough for the non-profit organization.
Stats:
Half a million text messages a month
Hundreds of thousands of texts a day
About Phoenix Children’s
Phoenix Children’s is a non-profit children’s hospital and one of the largest pediatric healthcare systems in the country, and the most comprehensive children's care facility in the state. They provide inpatient, outpatient, trauma, and emergency care across more than 75 subspecialties. Phoenix Children’s has been utilizing SMS for the past eight years but has switched to using short codes with SignalWire in 2019.
The Challenge
Phoenix Children’s used different providers throughout the last eight years and saw a significant decrease in throughput after mobile carriers started aggressively blocking 10 digit long codes. Phoenix Children’s needed a way to reliably send messages to patients and their employees.
Phoenix Children’s has found that their employees and patients prefer to communicate through SMS as opposed to getting stuck in long phone trees or having nurses take time out of their busy schedules to make phone calls. They instead use various text message campaigns to send appointment reminders, end of visit summaries, book follow-up appointments, send updates to parents with patients in surgery, talk back and forth with doctors, and more. With such important use cases, high throughput was a large priority for Phoenix Children’s.
Phoenix Children’s is a nonprofit and relies on donors so it was important that they find the best value possible. Other SMS providers they looked into were overly expensive, especially for a short code solution, which was a big problem considering how many campaigns they use text messaging for.
The Solution
Phoenix Children’s currently uses SignalWire SMS to communicate with their patients and employees. Before adopting text messaging, they would only call patients if lab results were positive which caused parents to worry. With SMS, Phoenix Children’s texts their patients a link to their lab results as soon as they are available.
Their SMS usage was also increased during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as the hospital texted each of their employees every day to remind them to take their temperature and wash their hands before coming to work as well as distributing COVID-19 test results to patients as fast as possible.
In 2019, Phoenix Children’s began using SignalWire short codes to increase its throughput. They started out sending about 130,000 texts a month and have gone up to half a million texts a month with no deliverability issues or message blocking from mobile carriers.
David Higginson, Chief Innovation Officer at Phoenix Children’s, chose SignalWire after learning about SignalWire being a disruptor in the space. Pricing is an important factor for any non-profit and SignalWire was able to provide SMS APIs and short codes at a fair and disruptive price point.
Results
High Throughput
With SignalWire short codes, Phoenix Children’s is able to send half a million text messages per month with no deliverability issues or message blocking.
Happy Patients
Patients and parents of the Phoenix Children’s have faster access to important information and can easily communicate with doctors and nurses without getting stuck in lengthy phone tress.
Easy to Use
SignalWire SMS APIs were easy to implement and the Phoenix Children’s text application was up and running on the SignalWire platform within a day.
Customer Success
The SignalWire Customer Success team and Carrier Operations team helped Phoenix Children’s through every step of the process required to register a short code phone number.
“We never could have texted this amount of people with the old solution we had.”
-David Higginson, Chief Innovation Officer at Phoenix Children’s