mHealth and Mobile Strategies - The Time Has Come!

With HIMSS in full swing, it’s an invigorating week for organizations concerned with healthcare IT. As expected, mobile health—mHealth—initiatives are front and center in light of the ubiquity of smartphones, tablets, and the many other portable devices in use today across healthcare organizations.

On Monday, Fierce Mobile Healthcare’s Editor Sara Jackson wrote an article discussing whether chief mobility officers are needed in hospitals given the organizational risks of sensitive data floating around on mobile devices. While the hospitals she talked to were evenly divided on the topic, the fact that this is something on people’s minds is telling.

So given the importance of securing electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI), has your hospital taken the steps needed to create a documented mobile strategy?

This task has been on the rainy day list for hospitals for far too long. There are a great deal of risks associated with not having this approach well defined, particularly when it comes to critical staff messages, such as code calls, patient lab results, consult requests, and more. Not having the proper technology in place could mean a lack of information security and message traceability, especially in the case of unencrypted texting among staff (something the Joint Commission frowns upon, particularly for orders).

It’s time for CIOs, CMIOs, and others to outline a strategy on mobile devices and enforce it. This strategy should include plans for supporting and messaging to the many different devices in use at hospitals, including smartphones, tablets, traditional cell phones, voice badges, pagers, Wi-Fi phones, etc. Other areas should include whether devices are to run mostly on Wi-Fi or cellular networks—or a combination of the two. Furthermore, IT teams will have to decide which types of devices are needed for which functions/jobs. These considerations should tie to how a clear mobile strategy can improve staff workflow for the good of everyone’s productivity and patient safety. For example, doctors use smartphones, nurses use Wi-Fi phones, housekeeping has pagers, etc.

Thoughts? Comments?