Contributor
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2 Messages
My medical center now advises its doctors to NOT use AT&T as AT&T is losing pages.
I work at a medical center and many people choose to have their pages sent to their cellphones. I have my pages sent to: [cell phone number]@Anonymous.att.net
The pages originate from: [edited for privacy-please do not post personal or unique information such as but not limited to full names, employee ID numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, account numbers, etc.]
I frequently either do no receive pages or I can receive the pages as long as 24 hours after the it was sent. The computer logs at my medical center show that the pages were sent out appropriately but AT&T is mishandling them.
The communications department of my medical centers says that this is a problem that is unique to AT&T. They further state that they have reached out to AT&T on multiple occasions and absolutely nothing has been done to correct this problem.
The communications department is now advising doctors to not use AT&T if they want to receive pages via their cellphone.
I will point out that [cell phone number]@Anonymous.att.net is used instead of [cell phone number]@txt.att.net as every single text is sent by AT&T from a unique number so every text seems to be coming from a stranger, but the MMS texts are identifiable as they are sent from a fixed number. I've been told that texts sent by Verizon originate from a single identity so they avoid this defect of AT&T's.
I don't expect this post to generate a change as multiple inquiries from my medical center to AT&T failed to fix the problem, but I at least wanted you to know that your failure to fix this problem is costing you customers.
ATTMobilityCare
Community Support
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15.2K Messages
9 years ago
Hello there @kaplanmg,
I’m sorry to hear that you are having trouble with receiving pages via your cellphone; I would be happy to assist you with this.
If you go to our Messaging Preferences user site, you can set up and manage your email-to-SMS and email-to-MMS messaging preferences. From your desktop computer, click here to access the user site. To read our support article on Email-to-text Message Preferences please click here.
Thank you,
Charise
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kaplanmg
Contributor
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2 Messages
9 years ago
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GeekBoy
Master
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4.1K Messages
9 years ago
I'm disappointed in your medical center for even suggesting that doctors use MMS/SMS for any urgent call notification issues. Neither MMS nor SMS are guaranteed delivery, so anyone who uses them for urgent notifications is foolish, as they may not get delivered at all, or they may be delayed if the coverage is poor, or if the system is operating at near capacity. It's amazing how many people tie critical information to a service that like IP traffic is designed to drop random traffic if the system gets overloaded. You never know when the traffic dropped will be the traffic that your life depends upon. Please let me know your medical center so I can avoid using them for any life critical issues.
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GeekBoy
Master
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4.1K Messages
9 years ago
I just looked back at the original post in this thread and it appears that the medical center is also using a second non-guaranteed and non-secure communications channel (email) to relay to the MMS/SMS channel. Email is another internet service which is not secure and is not guaranteed that the delivery will make it to the final desination let alone in a rapid manner. I find it so hard to believe that a medical center would rely upon such an insecure and error prone service to relay critical information to their doctors. I would have thought that there would be laws in place to protect us from careless administrators like that who design their systems on the basis of cheapest cost rather than most reliable and most secure of the patient's critical information.
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GLIMMERMAN76
ACE - Expert
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23.9K Messages
9 years ago
@GeekBoy
There are laws like HIPA that protect people. This is a case of someone being cheap. There are lots of safeguards in programs like epic that will send pages to cell phones via a app that is secure.
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