The Beep Goes On

Most of my blog posts over the past few months, including this one, are focused on smartphones. Clinical smartphone communication is such a widely talked-about, read-about and thought-about topic because it is completely re-defining the beep and call-back procedure and offering providers a way to fundamentally change their workflows. On a smartphone, the alert message lets a provider know if a situation is critical, or if it can wait until their current task is completed. Smartphones offer the ability to respond immediately with an acknowledgment, a reply, or even a call to discuss information. And, the entire exchange can be tracked, providing a full audit trail.

So why isn’t everyone adopting smartphone usage at their facility? A recent article in The Globe and Mail discusses some of the implementation challenges and looks at how several hospitals are approaching these topics.

If you are curious to read more about what other facilities are up to, Amcom conducted a survey of more than 300 hospitals in June 2012 to find out how they are approaching mobility strategies. You’ll find the outcomes in both white paper and webinar formats.

I would love to hear from you, too. Is your facility piloting or implementing a smartphone program? Who gets to use them – providers only, or other staff such as nurses, transport teams, and housekeeping? What challenges are you facing and how are you overcoming them?

As Heard on National Public Radio

We’ve blogged a lot this year about smartphone usage in healthcare. It’s an evolving communications platform that more and more hospitals are using in daily care delivery and it has even attracted the attention of National Public Radio (NPR). This week, NPR highlighted this topic in their Morning Edition segment Are Pagers Obsolete? and we are pleased to be a part of the story.

Despite their decline in most other sectors, pagers remain an important piece of healthcare communications with an estimated 90% of hospitals in the country using paging systems. Traditional pagers are simple to use and typically transmit data not sensitive enough to require encryption.

With smartphones, hospitals need data encryption to be HIPAA and HITECH compliant because of the nature of patient information being transmitted among staff. As opposed to pagers, smartphones offer faster communications by eliminating call-backs and with the right communications platform they can also provide invaluable message tracking for audits. Brian Edds, Amcom Director of Product Management, also noted in the NPR podcast, “Doctors don’t want to carry a pager anymore. They want to carry their iPhone or their Android device.”

We see continued demand for both devices and anticipate that paging systems and encrypted smartphone communications will co-exist in the healthcare space for the foreseeable future. As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Stony Brook University Medical Center is Deploying Smartphone Messaging for 3,000 BlackBerry Smartphones

We’re thrilled that Stony Brook University Medical Center has chosen our pager replacement and smartphone messaging system, Amcom Mobile Connect. They will be using it for 3,000 BlackBerry smartphones throughout their facility to handle high-volume messaging.

This well-respected medical center will also benefit from Mobile Connect’s encrypted messages and full visibility and traceability of all message activity. This will include time and date stamps showing when messages are sent, delivered, and opened, as well as when responses are sent and the information contained in each response.

You can read more in the press release we issued today.

Mobile Messaging and Encryption

We’re often asked whether we see encryption coming into play when messaging to mobile devices. To us, this question is better turned around to our customers – are they seeing a need for encryption? The answer has been an overwhelming yes. Especially in the healthcare community where patient data enters the mix, encryption is a necessary component of mobile messaging.

We agree with our customers. Sensitive information via SMS needs to be encrypted from the time it leaves the host system – a hospital’s Web directory or operator console – until it is received by the smartphone. Government initiatives such as HIPAA and HITECH are dictating the requirements when it comes to the exchange of electronic protected health information (ePHI). As we develop our applications, we’re paying close attention. This is especially important as we at Amcom look ahead to the future of our mobile applications and consider our plans to deepen our integrations with EMR systems.

Here again is where Amcom Mobile Connect comes into play. One of the many advantages of an application that resides on the smartphone is that it can handle decryption, helping to ensure the integrity of data. Something else to consider is that the BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) takes care of encryption on its own, which many of our customers find appealing. For those using Android or other popular smartphones, Amcom also offers encrypted communications that meet industry standards.

While messages sent via a BES are encrypted, messages passing through other network-based pathways are not. We’ve heard our customers loud and clear, and understand the need for secure messaging and the assurance that sensitive information is traveling over a secure connection.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on encryption. Do you see it as a requirement for healthcare messaging? Would you consider implementing a system which wasn’t encrypted?