Thursday, August 25, 2011

Amcom and Cisco in Healthcare

Amcom continues to focus on enabling messages to be sent to an ever-broader array of devices to support the diversity of communications tools different staff members use in today’s hospitals. In fact, our Amcom Mobile Connect smartphone/tablet messaging solution now enables hospitals to send staff encrypted critical communications on Cisco wireless IP phones and Cius tablets. Read more.

In addition to our support for Cisco devices, Amcom has been a member of the Cisco Developer Community since 2003. This means we maintain certifications on a number of products which integrate with Cisco Unified Communications applications and devices. We’re pleased to announce that the latest versions of our operator console applications have successfully completed interoperability testing with Cisco UCCX 8.5, UCM 8.5, and UCCE 8.5. For customers who have Cisco phone systems or plan to migrate to them, this means they’ll have a proven technology backbone supporting their mission-critical communications. Read more.

Curious to hear more about Amcom and Cisco in healthcare? Drop us a note below!

Friday, August 12, 2011

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.