Dive Brief:
- Doctors are increasingly taking tablets to encounters, a trend that is creating both opportunities and problems for health IT professionals.
- To address this trend, HIMSS surveyed 170 healthcare IT professionals and found 59% have mobile technology in place, and another 29% are developing a plan to cope with the growth of tablet and smartphone use.
- Because 83% of physicians use mobile technology to provide patient care, IT must manage and secure these devices as well, the study found.
Dive Insight:
Healthcare organizations certainly have their hands full when it comes to managing the polyglot mix of devices and operating systems present in today's mobile market. But they'd better continue to adapt, as mobile communications are critical to how today's physicians and nurses function. Where organizations can afford it, it seems like a good idea for them to buy and issue tablets to clinicians -- something some health systems have already done. Buying thousands of tablets is an enormous investment, but it beats the security cost of having what's essentially a separate network running in your hospital or health system -- one over which you have no control.