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?