Continuing to See Cisco Momentum in Hospitals

We’re continuing to hear from hospitals of all sizes that they want to leverage their Cisco platforms as the foundation for other mission-critical messaging and communications such as Amcom. Case in point, Rockingham Memorial Hospital (RMH) has a Cisco wireless VoIP foundation and is working with us to address the needs of its mobile staff. This 238-bed hospital in Harrisonburg, Va., is implementing Amcom's encrypted smartphone messaging, Web-based directory / on-call scheduling, and emergency notification solutions. The hospital contact center will also use Amcom's call recording solution to improve call center quality, monitor compliance, and evaluate operator training needs. RMH chose Amcom in part due to its Cisco integration strategy and for its breadth of products that provide the ability to create a succinct communications flow throughout the hospital.

You can read the press release we issued this week to learn more.

Any comments or thoughts on how you’re seeing Cisco used for advanced messaging or workflows today?

Looking Into Our Crystal Ball

Now that 2012 is upon us, and given the new possibilities of smartphones, we assembled a roundtable of industry and technology experts to compile a list of what 2012 will mean for smartphone use in hospitals. We even created a report about it.

The panel believes 2012 will be a transformational year for smartphones in healthcare. 2009-2011 focused on smartphone adoption. 2012 will be very different. It will mark the beginning of an era in which hospitals really figure out how to take these devices beyond their use as individual reference tools and turn them into technology that is truly interconnected throughout the enterprise.

The exciting news is that people are becoming very clever with how to use them in new ways to make meaningful improvements in healthcare. With emerging capabilities far beyond phone calls, email, and even access to medical apps, smartphones have kicked off not only a communications revolution, but a productivity one as well.

So with that, these are the 10 predictions for what we’ll be seeing this year. We’ll know in a few short months whether these are on the money! (If you’d like the full detail on each of these, you can check out the report after a short form).

1. Hospitals will start doing even smarter things with smartphones to make them an essential part of everyday healthcare communications
2. An incident involving compromised protected health information (PHI) on a smartphone will cause headlines and fines
3. The proliferation of different mobile communication devices gets worse
4. Traceability becomes a requirement, not a luxury
5. Pagers RIP? Nope. The prediction of the death of pagers will be proved wrong
6. Specialized communication hardware devices will fail to gain traction
7. Web out, apps in
8. Hospitals raise the “Now What?” question with tablets
9. Hospitals will deliver comprehensive mobile strategies
10. IT and BioMed will join forces in the name of improved workflows

Any thoughts?