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?

Speech Recognition Enhances Mobility

We’ve noticed an interesting trend lately as hospital call centers have increasingly come to us to replace their legacy operator console systems. Many want to add superior speech recognition to their communications platform. This technology has come a long way.

Doctors, specialists, nurses and other members of their care teams truly recognize the value of being able to reach each other quickly, no matter where they are. Just think—mobile caregivers might not have everyone’s contact info and preferences in their heads or in their contact lists, so the ability to call into the on-call directory, tell the system a name or department, then quickly get connected, can help make these busy people’s lives “hands-free” and “hassle-free.”

A cardiologist can call the hospital from her office, a clinic, or even from her car, ask for a colleague by name and within seconds—without involving the call-center staff—reach the patient’s on-duty nurse, a specialist, or their GP. The nurse can reach any doctor or their on-call back-up without searching. He or she can just call the speech system, ask for the doctor or specialty and the speech engine quickly makes the connection.

These are great new use cases. Let us know how you’re using speech technology in your hospital. What successes and challenges have you experienced?

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?

Secure Messaging from a Smartphone to Any Other Device at Your Hospital

It’s an exciting time for Amcom because we’ve just announced the latest release of our Amcom Mobile Connect (AMC) product, which offers some amazing new capabilities for hospitals. The most notable enhancement is that a user can communicate with other individuals or groups via encrypted, traceable messages—right from their smartphone or tablet running AMC. Amcom Mobile Connect runs on Apple®, BlackBerry®, and Android® smartphones and tablets, as well as Cisco® tablets and wireless IP phones.

With full authenticated directory access, clinicians or others can send messages to staff running Amcom Mobile Connect on smartphones/tablets, as well as colleagues using pagers, wireless telephones, and other types of devices. As in previous versions of the product, staff can also send messages from Amcom operator consoles, Web directories, emergency notification, and other solutions.

We’re also keeping security top of mind. Amcom Mobile Connect uses industry standard best practices to ensure the protection of sensitive electronic health information in accordance with guidelines from HIPAA and the HITECH Act. This includes a variety of security features, including encryption, application lock, automated message removal, and password-protected inbox. With version 3.0 administrators can complete a remote device wipe to remove Amcom Mobile Connect messages from a smartphone that has been lost or stolen.

These capabilities contrast sharply with the limitations of text (SMS) messaging, which lacks the message traceability and encryption that could lead to a security breach. In fact, the Joint Commission stated on Nov. 10, “No it is not acceptable for physicians or licensed independent practitioners to text orders for patients to the hospital or other healthcare setting. This method provides no ability to verify the identity of the person sending the text and there is no way to keep the original message as validation of what is entered into the medical record.”

You can learn more about Amcom Mobile Connect on our Web site.

As always, your comments are welcome!