Check, Please

Imagine going to dinner with a friend who’s suggested a hot new restaurant. And as it turns out, he was right - the food was great, and the service outstanding. Now here comes the check, and the inevitable question: Who pays? Your friend was the one who recommended the place, but you’ve had a great meal.

This same stare down is also taking place at hospitals across the country, only no one can escape to the restroom to avoid the check. In healthcare it’s become a question of who pays for the wave of smartphones continually flowing into healthcare facilities. We, of course, have kept tabs on the smartphone trend, and wondered who was picking up the tab. So, as we often do, we asked our customers at a few of our regional user conferences.

The simple answer: There is no answer. Our user community has reported several different models within their hospitals, but the industry seems far from any sort of standard practice.

Some facilities take a more aggressive approach, where both IT and physicians agree that smartphones are a must. These facilities tend to be the ones who are paying for (and supporting) smartphones, typically choosing to standardize on a single platform. BlackBerry tends to be far and away the most popular, probably due to BES integration (BlackBerry Enterprise Server). With this comes a layer of data protection, in that a lost device can be remotely wiped of any data it may contain. Super safe for HIPAA compliance.

Other facilities seem to want to avoid the support headache that goes along with having hundreds of new smartphones put in the hands of users who may be both less than gentle and less than tech savvy. Still, the demand is there and IT teams are stepping up to support the docs who are using their personal smartphones for hospital-related communications.

Yet another camp seems to be a bit more about sharing, where IT teams are welcoming staff members’ personal smartphones, and administrators have agreed to share the costs. So hospitals will pay staff members for some of their monthly bill, figuring that a proportional amount of use will be hospital-related. A moderately cost-effective approach, but it does add separate costs in the form of administrative effort.

So what’s the best model? We have no idea. There are pros and cons to each. Are you looking to reduce costs but willing to give up a bit of data control? Is money no object when it comes to HIPAA compliance and mobile capabilities? Like people choosing a favorite restaurant, every hospital has its own tastes too.

We’d love to hear your views on who pays for these devices within your hospital. Leave us a note below!