Behold The Arrival of The Chief Mobile Healthcare Officer

Managing fleets of mobile devices is an increasingly important part of a healthcare IT executive’s job. Not only must IT execs figure out how to provide basic OS and application support – and whether to permit staffers and clinicians to do the job with their own devices – they need to decide when and if they’re ready to begin integrating these devices into their overall lines of service. And to date, there’s still no standard model using mobile devices to further hospital or medical practice goals, so a lot of creativity and guesswork is involved.

But over time, it seems likely that health systems and medical practices will go from tacking mobile services onto their infrastructure to leading their infrastructure with mobile services. Mobile devices won’t just be a bonus – an extra way for clinicians to access EMR data or consumers to check lab results on a portal – but the true edge of the network. Mobile applications will be as much a front door to key applications as laptop and desktop computers are today.

This will require a new breed of healthcare IT executive to emerge: the mobile healthcare IT leader. It’s not that today’s IT leaders aren’t capable of supervising large mobile device deployments and integration projects that will emerge as mHealth matures. But it does seem likely that even the smartest institutional HIT leader won’t be able to keep up with the pace of change underway in the mHealth market today.

After all, new approaches to deploying mHealth are emerging almost daily, from advances in wearables to apps offering increasingly sophisticated ways of tracking patient health to new approaches to care coordination among patients, caregivers and friends. And given how fast the frontier of mHealth is evolving, it’s likely that healthcare organizations will want to develop their own hybrid approaches that suit their unique needs.

This new “chief mobile healthcare officer” position should begin to appear even as you read this article. Just as chief medical information officers began to be appointed as healthcare began to turn on digital information, CMHOs will be put in place to make sense of, and plan a coherent future for, the daily use of mobile technology in delivering care. The CMHO probably won’t be a telephony expert per se  (though health systems may scoop up leaders from the health divisions of say, Qualcomm or Samsung) but they’ll bring a broad understanding of the uses of and potential for mobile healthcare. And the work they do could transform the entire institution they serve.