Case Study: Grand River Hospital achieves secure, real-time clinical communication and improved patient care with BlackBerry BBM Enterprise

BlackBerry and Grand River Hospital Partner via BBM Enterprise to provide Security, Coordination, and Better Care

Grand River Hospital, a 4,000‑staff regional hospital serving more than 700,000 people in Southwestern Ontario, needed a secure, easy‑to‑use way for clinicians to communicate in real time. Phone calls were inefficient and prone to delays, while email and SMS posed privacy risks for personal health information, so the hospital sought a mobile messaging solution that met strict provincial privacy requirements.

GRH partnered with BlackBerry to deploy BBM Enterprise (managed with BlackBerry UEM) and customized features such as role‑based group chats, searchable contacts, 48‑hour message expiry, and disabled cut/paste and photo storage. The secure platform—also available on desktop—has sped up clinical decisions (reducing some consults from 10–15 minutes to under a minute), lowered PHI exposure risk, improved cross‑department communication (notably in medical imaging), and set the hospital on a path to broader rollout.

Grand River Hospital

Sylvia Carney

Manager, Information Privacy and Access