Survey Says!

Given how quickly mobile device adoption and preferences are changing, we’re keenly interested to see the trends taking shape in hospitals regarding usage. I blogged several months ago about the October 2010 survey we conducted on this topic. Last month, we ran a similar survey of more than 600 healthcare organizations about their use of smartphones and tablets in critical communications. Survey participants were from hospitals of all sizes across North America and included clinical leadership, IT, telecommunications, and call center management titles.

We wanted to better understand how mobile devices are making an impact in critical healthcare communications, and how organizations are addressing some of the following challenges:

• Determining which personnel will use smartphones and tablets


• Determining which types of smartphones and tablets to support while continuing to use many other types of communication devices such as pagers


• Determining who should pay for the devices and data plans


• Determining how to insert these devices in the mix of critical communications


• Ensuring messages are sent securely and meet HIPAA requirements

While some of the findings were what we expected (iPad is the preferred tablet!), other responses were surprising, such as hospitals using SMS/email to send sensitive messages, which leads to questions about lack of security and HIPAA concerns.

Interested in finding more about what respondents said about smartphone and tablet usage in their hospitals? You can download the report here.

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts.