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We use a company called USA Mobility for our pager needs. We send to both a cell phone and to the pager so that we have some redundancy available. USA Mobility costs about the same as a cell phone, but it is unlimited two-way messaging, so we hammer it pretty hard from Nagios with few problems.

Yes, Hospitals are probably the biggest customer of paging companies. Most hospitals have in-house repeaters for better coverage than a cellphone. Especially in the underground morgue in the basement.

You are also likely to have better coverage in and around larger cities ensuring you receive the page (a must for medical professionals) and some technologies will resend pages if the device does not confirm receipt.

Check out http://www.usamobility.com/

As for "banana" phones... (please, don't start singing that damned song!) it depends on the facility I guess. Once the infrastructure is in place in a hospital, it's about as expensive as a high-end PBX desk phone so restricting it to a few important doctors just isn't required.

I work at a Hospital that uses "spectralink" phones - also called banana phones or bat phones depending on the yellow or black case it's in. They are a strictly in-house addition to the PBX system (you may be able to get a signal up to a few hundred feet outside the building, but that's it) and do not interfere with life support systems, wifi, etc.

I doubt any doctors actually have their own, it's mostly administration, management and other key people around the facility. Most departments will have a few "spares" which are rotated around with the staff... So you can always reach the in-house anesthesiologist on call by dialing a given number - but it could be any one of several people who answer depending on who's working that day.

If you need a specific doctor, you just page them.

http://www.usamobility.com/

We use http://www.usamobility.com/

It works. It's cheaper by far than offering all your employees cell phones, particularly if you intend on forcing them to wear the leash.

Doctors still use pagers too, they are just more reliable in the sense that you will almost certainly get the page unless you are intentionally trying to hide from civilization.

Cell phones are great if you want to talk to people, but if you just want to know people want to talk to you ... pagers are still better.

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That's the only one I know about...

I used to work for a hospital and they are pretty much the only group left.

I work for a hospital, and we have a heavy reliance on pagers. Likely for all the reasons you listed. We certainly don't want a doctor missing their page. You should be able to get a nice 2 way pager with nationwide service cheap as dirt with no contracts in this day and age.

We use a company called USA Mobility but I think they offer only corporate solutions, not individual paging accounts. For an individual solution... yeah, I don't know. About the only people who need an individual pager are drug dealers (no account needed, harder to trace than a cell phone).

http://www.usamobility.com/products/messaging/ They do our pagers - they work great.

We still use pagers for our notification systems. Most cell providers do not do guaranteed delivery/receipt of text messages while 2 way paging service will. It often has a much larger range than cell towers will give you and works further inside building that cell phones die in. Regardless of what many say here, pagers are not obsolete.

I personally have found the USAMobility people responsive enough, generally knowledgeable and the times the device has broken, they've had a new one to me in 24 hours.

Others have mentioned Skytel and Metrotel, which offer similar services and models. (Quite a few of the paging companies have been bought up or been consolidated, but generally I've found the coverage areas have not reduced).

I don't know what would happen, but the user manual warns against it. (scroll to the bottom) Pager Manual

Pagers definitely have not gone, they just have become unpopular among consumers as two-way messaging replaced it. Hospitals and the US Government use one-way pagers still a lot. Our company was apparently taken over by another larger one, http://www.usamobility.com/