The American Journal of Surgery published this paper on the benefits of an alphanumeric paging system on physician's work environment (full text $30). It is not surprise that improved communications was beneficial.

It's always nice to see quantitative data demonstrating the value of improved communications. Doing a study like this with an old and obsolete technology like pagers seems, well, a waste. No one's ever studied the effectiveness of pager based communications in a hospital before?

Perhaps this is just my pager bias showing. Pagers are an open loop system - there is nothing that ensures that a page was sent and received by the pager, let alone acknowledged by the user. This is a poor technology platform for communications that is intended to improve patient safety. A study like this measuring the impact of new more capable technologies, like wireless voice-over-IP (VoIP) would seem much more relevant. Perhaps the investigators could repeat their study with Vocera badges or a VoIP phone with graphics (for waveforms) to see if there is an increase in effectiveness with the newer technologies.