With mHealth level, the Smartphone is Merely the Beginning

Healthcare contributors are investing much time and money in enterprise-wide communications, and conclusion that the smartphone is a very versatile device.

Health networks are finding that an enterprise-wide smartphone level is much more than merely a cool way to give everyone a latest phone.

For Autumn Foy, director of clinical informatics at the Onslow Memorial Hospital, putting few 325 iPhones into the hands of the staff and clinicians at the North Carolina hospital is 1 measure toward improved care team coordination, which means better sufferer safety and better clinical results. When you are a small hospital on a tight budget taking a close look at a million-dollar project, those results resonate.

 “Our concentration at first was on sufferer safety,” claims Foy, who had to sell hospital executives on the merits of the level. “From there we observed at (the benefits in) making better the workflows, and making our employees more mobile. It is been a long, complicated procedure and a little problematic at times, but when you take a look at the sufferer first, that is a great 1^st step.”

Foy got the OK previous September to integrate the PatientSafe Solutions mobile level, and went about equipping nurses and staff with the tools to make better the real-time communications and scan sufferer medications. Later this year, staff will be capable to utilize the tools to register and track infants, match specimen collections with sufferers, and scan blood products to make certain that they are going to and coming from the correct departments.

Along the way, Foy hopes that clinicians will be capable to decrease the number of tools they carry with them, from 4 to 3 or even less. And she expects to someday cut in half the hospital’s fleet of 42 mobile computers-on-wheels (COWS, which typically cost about $5,000 apiece, in accordance to industry estimates).

“We are decreasing our footprint,” she claims, “and making it convenient for (clinicians and staff) to do the things they require to do” without running around searching for persons, COWs or open computer stations.

And it all begins with a smartphone.

Onslow is part of an increasing trend in healthcare, in accordance to recent research by Spyglass Consulting. Some 63% of health systems surveyed by the California-based consultant are deploying or policy on executing an mHealth communications level of at least 500 smartphones within the next twelve to eighteen months. And 44% of those agencies have a comprehensive strategy in place that seeks at smartphones as more than merely a communications device.