Here’s one more example of where Bring Your Own Device is causing security problems for hospitals. A new report by Spyglass Consulting Group suggests that while most nurse use personal smartphones on the job, few hospital IT departments support these devices.
According to Spyglass, 69 percent of hospitals said that their nurses use personal mobile devices, often to fill in gaps left by the technology the hospital provides for communication. This is no surprise. While there’s an armada of personal nursing devices which allow nurses to communicate with other staffers, smartphones do a better job, as they’re light, boast an easy to use interface and unlike VoWiFi devices, unaffected by local network ups and downs.
It’s worth noting that 25 percent of care providers interviewed by Spyglass weren’t happy with the quality and reliability of the wireless network within their facilities. That’s further evidence that VoIP devices commonly used for nursing communication aren’t riding on a solid base.
So, nurses are driven to use the smartphones they bring in from home. Those phones become the basis for mission-critical communications around day-to-day care. But at the risk of repeating myself — OK, I’ve already repeated myself often on this subject — these unsupported, vulnerable devices can be hacked or stolen quite easily. If a phone is left in a public area, not only are nurses deprived of a critical communications channel, the e-mail or texts or voicemails they’ve sent regarding patient care has just walked off as well, offering bunch of private data in the clear. Plus, there are free solutions to this communications, privacy and security problem like docBeat that are much much more functional than what’s on the nurses’ personal devices anyway.
According to the Spyglass researchers, who conducted 100+ interviews with nurses working in acute care, hospital IT personnel are concerned about the increasing dependence of clinicians on personal mobile devices. But I note that at least in the report summary written up by Healthcare IT News, you don’t hear about a stampede of hospital IT departments rushing to establish support policies and deploy enterprise-class mobile management tools. I must say, I’m not sure what they’re waiting for.
