How Do I Get to the App Store?

A friend of mine is a photographer and he works with Photoshop nearly every day. Like many people, he’s very savvy with the functions he uses all the time. Tackling out-of-the-ordinary requests, however (Can you remove the maid of honor’s now ex-boyfriend from the photo?), requires a bit of a learning curve.

I’ve heard from several organizations that one of their biggest challenges to rolling out encrypted smartphone texting at their facility is device support. Users know some of their phone functions very well, but they aren’t familiar with other features. Even in a bring-your-own-device scenario, one of the common questions is (believe it or not): How do I get to the app store? If you’ve also wondered this, you are in good company with nurses, administrators, environmental services staff, and yes, physicians, too. 

On the desktop of your phone you will see one of the following icons (listed alphabetically). They represent the applications store for that device. Getting the process rolling only requires the tip of your finger – touch the icon on your phone and enter. Search features allow you to find applications by name or by function, just like browsing the Internet, and then you can touch them for more information or to download. Happy shopping! 

Android’s Play Store



Apple Mac App Store



BlackBerry App World

P.S. To find our secure texting app, search for ‘Amcom’ and you will find us:

Healthcare Is a Team Sport

I recently read an interview with Emory Healthcare’s CEO John Fox in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The bulk of the piece centered on effectively changing the hospital culture to improve quality, and then one sentence jumped right out at me: “Healthcare is a team sport.” Mr. Fox was speaking about a team of people, of course, but this also includes supporting technology – team players can significantly improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare.

If you think about a typical visit to the hospital, there are a plethora of systems that get touched from the moment a patient enters the hospital doors until well after he or she leaves. If I were team captain, I would want all of my players to talk with one another and coordinate their efforts. Can the admitting hospitalist on duty be reached quickly for a consultation? Do lab test results automatically update in a patient’s EMR? How about you? Do your communication systems and technologies act like team players to support and improve the game of your staff?

A Resolution for the New Year

Hospitals and healthcare systems across the country are struggling to increase care quality, employee engagement, and patient satisfaction while simultaneously reducing costs. An article in the Journal of Healthcare Management estimated some of the costs associated with poor communications in healthcare. I was shocked at the numbers:

•  U.S. hospitals waste over $12 billion annually from communication inefficiencies among care providers
• Increase in length of stay accounts for 53 percent of that annual economic burden

• A 500-bed hospital loses over $4 million annually as a result of communication inefficiences  

Improving communications is a great opportunity to make strides on quality, satisfaction and cost initiatives. How about a New Year’s resolution to:

• Help providers connect quickly using mobile communications 
• Improve the quality of care by ensuring efficient communication of radiology and lab results to ordering physicians
• Increase patient satisfaction with faster responses and a quieter environment 

Here are success stories from Lake Norman Regional and others to serve as inspiration!

To BYOD or Not to BYOD, that is the Question

Is it safer in the hospital to control end-user devices, or less expensive to let staff bring their own? The ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) question generally centers on these two topics, and the idea that having one means compromising on the other. 

If hospitals issue devices, security of electronic protected health information (ePHI) can be more tightly managed, but it costs $$ to purchase the devices and maintain the plans. If institutions allow staff to bring their own, the device costs decrease, but what about security and control over how the device is used? The short answer is that BYOD options don’t have to mean more security risks. Institutions truly can get their arms around this.

 If you are considering a BYOD option, you really need a secure way to send text messages and ensure that the messages are encrypted from the moment they leave their point of origin until the recipient has received the message and it resides on the mobile device. Keeping an audit trail of messages is important, too, and helps protect against hearsay on message content and receipt.

 Is your facility considering a BYOD option? Are you in the middle of implementing one? What are your challenges? What are some of your solutions? We had some great dialogue at Connect 12, and now we have an opportunity for it to continue on the blog.

The Ultimate Boss

The first day of class in high school, my chemistry teacher walked silently into the room after we were seated, took a dollar out of his pocket, and put it in a glass jar on the podium. I was confused until he explained that his actions represented what we did every day. As his students, we were the source of his paycheck and were ultimately his boss. He ran the classroom, but we had a voice.

I was reminded of this experience last week when I read an interview in Healthcare Informatics between Rasu B. Shrestha, M.D., and HCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland about the 2012 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual conference. Although the article was a great overview of some of the top trends and RSNA discussion topics, what really stuck with me and prompted the dollar-in-the-jar memory was Dr. Shrestha’s last statement: “Above all, you have to look at what is needed to become patient-centric, and to enable the clinician workflow that can make that a reality.”

Looking at a provider’s workflow and thinking “What can we change here to improve the patient experience?” is something I do on a daily basis. Communication is a large component of any clinician’s workflow; it takes time to gather information about a patient from the EMR, colleagues, lab and imaging test results, verbal and text-based conversations, and personal observations…. Finding solutions that can make these tasks more efficient is a win. Providers run the treatment plans, but saving a little time on communications means having more time to listen to the voice of the ultimate boss – the patient.