63 percent of hospitals and health systems surveyed have deployed or plan to deploy a mobile communications platform supporting more than 500 smartphones over the next 12 to 18 months, according to study conducted by Spyglass Consulting Group.
The report, “Large-scale Smartphone-based deployments enable hospital-wide communications” identifies the market opportunities and challenges for hospital IT shops to widely deploy a smartphone‐based communications platform to support patient care teams and other mobile hospital workers across the enterprise.
These deployments address the mission- and patient-critical communications required by nurses and other mobile hospital workers across the enterprise. The average size deployment included 1,100 smartphones while the largest deployment included more than 5,000 smartphones.
Spyglass found that forty-four percent of organizations surveyed had developed comprehensive mobile communications strategies to address the current and future communications and collaboration requirements of nurses, care team members, and other mobile hospital workers.
Critical Success Factors for Mobile Communication Deployment
Spyglass identified the following four critical success factors for hospital IT to consider when widely deploying a smartphone‐based communications platform:
1. Scalability. All organizations surveyed report that a highly reliable, manageable, and scalable communications platform is important to support mission and patient‐critical communications.
2. Interoperability. Seventy‐eight percent of organizations surveyed believe that tight integration with hospital IT systems infrastructure and medical devices is critical to support data driven closed‐loop communications.
3. Multi‐device support. Eighty‐three percent of organizations surveyed report that cross platform support including hospital‐owned smartphones, personally owned smartphones, and a desktop computer interface is important for enhancing and expanding care team collaboration within the hospital and across the community.
4. Hospital leadership. All organizations surveyed believe that strong hospital administration leadership, commitment, and investment are critical for deploying, supporting, and maintaining a large‐scale smartphone‐based communications platform across the enterprise.
Key Findings
Other key findings of the report include:
● 56% of organizations have standardized on an enterprise‐class smartphone.
● Sixty‐one percent of organizations surveyed expressed concerns that existing tools require manual device provisioning, which is a labor‐intensive and time‐consuming process requiring upwards of 10 minutes per device.
● All provider organizations surveyed report that a critical success factor for supporting a large‐scale smartphone‐based communications system was ensuring that the underlying platform was highly reliable, manageable, and scalable to support mission and patient critical communications.
● Fifty percent of organizations surveyed expressed concerns that existing tools have limited options for analytics and reporting. They are reliant upon the vendor to manually access the raw audit logs (CSV files) and generate monthly reports identifying the aggregate number of calls, text messages and alarms that have been received per department, which they believe provides limited value, context, and insights.
● Seventy‐two percent of organizations surveyed have deployed an MDM solution from companies such as VMware AirWatch, Symantec Mobile Device Management, and Citrix Systems XenMobile to help manage mobile device inventory, monitor end user activity, control mobile application updates, and protect the mobile device and content from unauthorized access.
● 78% of organizations believe a tightly integrated IT infrastructure is a success factor for supporting a large‐scale smartphone communication platform.
● 83% of organizations surveyed indicated the need for a communication platform that spans inside and outside the hospital.
The full report is available here