An overwhelming majority of health care executives say mobile devices are critical to day-to-day operations in the home health and hospital industries, reveals the recent “Healthcare Goes Mobile” survey.
Tablets and smartphones are quickly becoming indispensable to hospital and home health agency services, indicated nearly 200 health care IT executives during the survey, conducted by NetMotion Wireless, provider of Enterprise Mobility Management software, in partnership with FierceMarkets.
“The home health industry is clearly enjoying the benefits and doing their best to manage the challenges of extending tablets and smartphones to hospital and home health workers,” said Tracy Crowe, Director of Product Marketing at NetMotion Wireless, in a statement. “This survey confirms that our solutions focusing on connectivity, visibility and control of mobile devices are essential to more productive mobile deployments in healthcare.”
Both patients and caregivers benefit from mobility, according to 93% of respondents who said mobile deployments were either “extremely” or “very important” to day-to-day operations. Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones can help workers in the field deliver patient care more efficiently, NetMotion Wireless says, and can give home health agencies centralized control regarding how their caregivers deliver services.
However, there are security challenges associated with mixed ownership of devises. Half of survey respondents said patient data security was their top concern, as compromises to network security and accidental access to patient data when clinicians or employees use personal devices can trigger HIPAA violations.
The two biggest complaints for mobile devices were slow network connectivity (45%) and dropped connections (24%).
“These are common problems because clinicians and home health caregivers are frequently roaming between varied networking topologies, for example from wired to Wifi to mobile broadband,” notes NetMotion Wireless.
Written by Alyssa Gerace
Companies featured in this article:
Enterprise Mobility Management, FierceMarkets, NetMotion Wireless
