Two other benefits cell phones have over really dumb pagers:
- Cell phones, perhaps surprisingly, cost about the same as pagers. At our rather large institution (11k employees, ~1000 housestaff) we could get a BB for $150, but pagers cost us $300. Monthly service was almost comparable, although I don’t remember exactly (depended what kind of service). If you could send it to somebody’s personal cell, it was substantially cheaper.
- I just wanted to emphasize how badly the pager infrastructure is falling apart. In our major metro area, our pager towers die about twice yearly, and it gets harder and harder to pay to keep them up, as the page system operators are all moving on to other related businesses rather than putting capital investment into paging infrastructure, just doing break-fix now. It will only be a couple of years before paging infrastructures die for that reason alone, unless hospitals are willing to support them on their own, and I don’t think that’s affordable.

Right now, the only reason that our institution still kept pagers was that the penetration of cellular signals isn’t as good as pagers, so there are places in the hospital, and in various buildings that physicians work, where they have no service. If it wasn’t for that, they’d have ditched them already for the various reasons above.