My step father is a physician - a geriatrician to be precise. Not only does he spend his days taking care of people in the twilight of their years, he's also the medical director for non-acute care at the largest hospital network in the Boston area. I adore this man.
Beyond the table stakes that he is so kind and caring to my mom, he's not your typical physician. He can intelligently talk about an incredibly broad range of subjects, and in fact I often find myself talking to him about how mobility can and could impact the healthcare industry. His input has been absolutely invaluable in helping me have more smarter conversations with other medical professionals regarding enterprise mobility.
Some of that thinking comes through in the latest article I have penned for FierceMobileIT.
The reality – and the challenge – is that there are many different kinds of “healthcare” organizations. You have skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), rehab centers, homecare providers, physician offices (both affiliated and unaffiliated to a hospital), independent lab services, and of course, hospitals – never mind the healthcare administrators. While they all share (hopefully) a common goal of providing care to those who are not well, they all serve different purposes within the medical “value chain.” These groups have different objectives, challenges and may even serve different client bases (e.g. Medicare, Medicaid or health insurance providers). This has only been compounded by the specialization of both medical practices and ancillary services in the ecosystem.
This specialization translates into the specific tasks and needs of these different constituents. Administrators in the healthcare industry are going to be very similar to administrators in other industries. They are primarily going to want or need PIM functionality for accessing email, contacts and calendar functionality. These needs are obviously very different from that of a home care provider who is going to need the equivalent of a CRM and Field Service solution – they are going to need access to a day’s agenda (whom they are going to visit), a tool to access the patient’s record/medical history, as well as a tool to quickly and effectively enter their notes once they have completed their visit. This alone has huge benefits because it not only reduces the amount of time the healthcare professional needs to spend after work hours writing up notes, but also streamlines the billing processes such that home care company gets reimbursed by the insurance provider that much more quickly. This goes beyond CRM, Field Service, or transaction processing to true business process enablement and/or automation. Speaking of automation, we haven’t yet talked about medical monitoring solutions. There’s an increasing array of devices that are able to relay patient data back to a central source and/or a healthcare provider in real-time via M2M. M2M solutions that leverage RFID or other location based technologies (such as GPS) are also becoming increasingly prevalent for inventory and asset management. Can’t find that crash cart? Look it up on the computer. M2M is one of the most exciting areas in enterprise mobility, particularly because of the impact it can have in improving the entire gamut of patient care.
Now much of what we’ve been discussing here has been related to mobile solutions…we haven’t yet touched upon WiFi enabled solutions. Voice over WiFi and mobile workstations to access electronic medical records also provide great benefits to a medical facility. These wireless networks can also be integrated into the other location based solutions that were discussed above.
Stan Lee, the legendary comic book writer, coined a phrase for his Spider Man series “With great power, come great responsibility.” I can’t think of a better line as it relates to mobility in the healthcare “industry,” particularly as it relates to HIPAA regulations and the need for governance, risk and compliance to those regulations.
The need for “responsibility” in the context of mobility in healthcare manifests itself through the need for a mobility management strategy. Regardless of their role in the value chain of care, healthcare providers need to have processes and tools in place to manage devices, applications, data, security and encryption for the information that is either stored or passing through a device. While the regulations within HIPAA are certainly unique to its industry, the premise and approach to dealing with these requirements is actually quite similar to how other industries deal with their own regulatory requirements.
So in conclusion, mobility certainly is an exciting area within the healthcare industry. With so many sub-segments, each with their own nuances, there are tremendous opportunities for mobility to positively impact workflows and patient care and safety. These sub-segments will also have their subtle nuances that will pose their own unique challenges, but in the end, they will all need to be managed through a well defined mobility strategy. I’ll be writing soon about other similarities that the healthcare industry has with other industries in the context of mobility.
