Hospitals Struggle To Get Users On Board With Mobile Policies

A new survey has found that hospitals are having a hard time managing and tracking user compliance with mobile communications policies.

The survey, which was conducted in early 2018 by communications vendor Spok, collected information on mobile device communications strategies from approximately 300 healthcare professionals. Forty-four percent of respondents were clinicians, 10% were IT and telecom staff, 6% were executive leaders, and another 40% had a wide variety of healthcare roles.

Spok found that hospitals who do have a mobile strategy in place have had one for a long time, with 42% having had such a strategy for either 3 to 5 years or more than five years. Another 46% have had a formal mobile strategy for one to three years. Only 12% have had a strategy in place for one year or less.

Reasons they cited for creating mobile device strategies included the launch of a communication initiative (46%); a clinical initiative (25%); or a technology initiative (24%). Five percent of responses were “other.” Top areas of focus for these strategies included mobile management and security (56%), mobile device selection (52%) and integration with the EHR (48%).

Other reasons for mobile initiatives included clinical workflow evaluation (43%), device ownership strategy/BYOD (34%), mobile apps strategy (29%), mobile app catalog (16%), mobile strategy governance (14%) and business intelligence and reporting strategy (12%).

However, there’s little agreement as to which hospital department should monitor compliance. Forty-three percent of respondents said the security team was monitoring policies for the hospital or system, 43% rely on a telecommunications team, 43% said a clinical informatics team played that role, and 26% had monitoring done by a mobile team. Twenty-one percent said individual departments enforce mobile policies and 9% said they don’t have an enforcement method in place. Another 9% of responses fell into the “other” category.

Given the degree to which monitoring varies between institutions, it’s little wonder to learn that policies aren’t enforced effectively in many cases. On the one hand, 39% respondents said the policies were enforced extremely well most of the time, and one-third said they were enforced well most the time. However, 4% said the policies were being enforced poorly and inconsistently, and 44% said they are not sure about how well the policies are being enforced.

Hospitals are aware of this problem, though, and many are taking steps to ensure that users understand and comply with mobile policies. According to the survey, 48% offer educational programs on the subject, 42% use technology or data gathered from devices to measure and track compliance, 37% leverage direct feedback from users and 23% use surveys.

Still, 21% said they don’t have a way to validate compliance — which suggests that hospitals have a lot more work to do.

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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