Health IT Leaders Struggle With Mobile Device Management, Security

A new survey on healthcare mobility has concluded that IT leaders aren’t thrilled with their security arrangements, and that a significant minority don’t trust their mobile device management solution either. The study, sponsored by Apple device management vendor Jamf, reached out to 550 healthcare IT leaders in the US, UK, France, Germany and Australia working in organizations of all sizes.

Researchers found that 83% or organizations offer smartphones or tablets to their providers, and that 32% of survey respondents hope to offer mobile devices to consumers getting outpatient care over the next two years.  That being said, they also had significant concerns about their ability to manage these devices, including questions about security (83%), data privacy (77%) and inappropriate employee use (49%).

The survey also dug up some tensions between their goals and their capacity to support those goals. Forty percent of respondents said staff access to confidential medical records while on the move was their key reason for their mobile device strategy. On the other hand, while 84% said that their organization was HIPAA-compliant, almost half of respondents said that they didn’t feel confident in their ability to adapt quickly to changing regulations.

To address their concerns about mobile deployments, many providers are leveraging mobile device management platforms.  Of those organizations that either have or plan to put an MDM solution in place, 80% said time savings was the key reason and 79% said enhanced employee productivity were the main benefits they hoped to realize.

Those who had rolled out an MDM solution said the benefits have included easier access to patient data (63%), faster patient turnaround (51%) and enhanced medical record security (48%). At the same time, 27% of respondents whose organizations had an MDM strategy in place said they didn’t feel especially confident about the capabilities of their solution.

In any event, it’s likely that MDM can’t solve some of the toughest mobile deployment problems faced by healthcare organizations anyway.

Health organizations that hope to leverage independently-developed apps will need to vet them carefully, as roughly one-quarter of these developers didn’t have privacy policies in place as of late last year. And the job of selecting the right apps is a gargantuan one. With the volume of health apps hitting almost 260,000 across the Google and Apple app marketplaces, it’s hard to imagine how any provider could keep up.

So yes, the more capabilities MDM systems can offer, the better. But choosing the right apps with the right pedigree strikes me as posing an even bigger challenge.

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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