Mobility Strategy Becoming More Important To Hospitals

An annual study of healthcare mobility has found that hospitals may be at a tipping point when it comes to mobile strategy. The study also suggests that hospitals are struggling with Wi-Fi coverage and BYOD issues, but when you add on the fact that mobile EHR access is maturing, you still have a picture in which mobile is playing a rapidly-expanding role.

Spok’s fifth-annual Mobility in Healthcare Survey, which gathered 550 responses in July of this year, found that the number of hospitals reporting having a documented mobility strategy has almost doubled since year one. Specifically, 63% of respondents said that they had a documented strategy in place, a huge shift from 2012, when only 34% of respondents had such a strategy.

Another interesting piece of data derived from the study is that the roles of those involved in forming mobile strategy have shifted meaningfully between 2014 and 2016.

For example, the number of respondents saying IT helped or would help drive mobile strategy changes fell 12 points, while those who said nurses were involved climbed 12 points. The number of respondents said doctors and consultants were involved climbed 9 points, and clinical leadership eight points. The greatest change was the role of nurses, whose current or planned involvement climbed 69% in absolute terms.

Mobile strategies emerging
When respondents that did not have a documented mobile strategy in place were asked why, 31% told Spok that they were in the process of developing such a strategy, 30% didn’t know, 17% said they had a verbal strategy in place which had not been written down or documented and 15% said budget constraints were holding them back.

Another notable set of data collected by Spok focused on which devices the respondent’s hospital was supporting. The fact that 78% percent supported smartphones was no big surprise, but it was a bit unexpected to find that 71% of hospital respondents support in-house pages. (I guess they’re like faxes — some technologies just won’t die!) Wi-Fi phones were supported by 69% of respondents, wide area pagers 57%, tablets 52%, voice badges 20% and smart watches/wearables 8%.

Meanwhile, among the key shifts in support for devices is that Wi-Fi phone and voice badge support were up 24% and 18% respectively in absolute terms. It’s also worth noting that support for smart watches/wearables has climbed to 8% near zero just last year. Clearly these are categories to watch.

Wi-Fi, BYOD challenges
As part of the support discussion, respondents also answered questions about Wi-Fi coverage, and the results highlighted some serious issues. In particular, while 83% of respondents said that their Wi-Fi connection is business-critical, they didn’t seem to feel in complete control of it.

More than half (54%) of respondents said they saw Wi-Fi coverage as a challenge, and 65% said they believed that there were some areas of poor coverage within their hospital. Other mobile device support challenges cited by respondents include data security (43%), user compliance with mobility, BYOD and EMM policies and procedures (39%) and IT support for users (37%).

Meanwhile, BYOD support and policies continue to be a contentious issue for hospitals. Nineteen percent of survey respondents said that their organizations hadn’t created any sort of BYOD program, an 8-point drop from 2015. The proportion of facilities with some type of a BYOD program also fell, from 73% to 58%, though – exercising survey options available for the first time – 5% said they were planning for BYOD and 18% said they didn’t know what was up on this front.

When asked why they chose to allow BYOD programs to exist, 60% of respondents said cost savings was a factor, 50% care team communication, and 46% said both physician demand and workflow time savings for users were important reasons. On the flip side, eighty-one percent of respondents said security issues were the primary reason they didn’t allow BYOD.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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