The Various Approaches to Mobility in Healthcare

I’m about to head down to the CTIA Super Mobility Week conference. I try to attend a few conferences each year that aren’t directly related to healthcare and health IT in order to get a broader perspective on what’s happening in the rest of the world. I think this will be one such case (although, they do have some mHealth sessions and exhibitors as well).

As I started to think about mobility and where it’s headed, the industry is all about the smart phone and smart mobile devices. I think it’s an incredibly powerful concept and one that will only become more important. However, I think that many people are taking it too far. While I love my smartphone and its capabilities, I still love the productivity that’s possible with a great desktop setup with dual monitors, a mouse and a keyboard. I’m not sure we’ll replicate that in a mobile world and I’m not sure we should.

In fact, it’s one of the trends I hate most about many of the website designs that are coming out lately. They are going all in on mobile and in the process they’re killing the productivity of the desktop experience. It’s a travesty and continues to annoy me with many of the applications I use on a daily basis.

We can apply this same principle to healthcare IT. Often we need to step back and ask ourselves if something really needs to be mobile or not. Plus, if we decide to make something mobile, we need to ensure that those who still use the same application in a non-mobile environment have their workflow optimized as well.

At the end of the day, we need to create a much more sophisticated approach to mobile computing. There are many times when a doctor or nurse really need whatever they’re working on to be mobile. There are extreme benefits to having a point of care device which allows the nurse or doctor to document at the point of care. However, there are just as many times when mobility is actually a hindrance to the required workflow.

What are you doing in your organization to leverage the amazing mobile technologies that are out there while still maintaining the optimized workflow?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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