A hospital's mobility strategy should always focus on helping patients and should have a long-term outlook that focuses on the bigger picture, blogger David Lee Scher, a former cardiac electrophysiologist and current consultant, writes in his most recent post on The Digital Health Corner blog. While having a mobile strategy might not seem as important as other tasks such as trying to meet Meaningful Use or ICD-10, he says, presence of the former can be critical in efforts for the latter.
Patient satisfaction should be the end goal for any sort of mobile strategy, according to Scher. After all, hospitals are in the business of aiding patients. Even if those benefits are felt indirectly--for example, if a mobile technology makes a process easier for billing employees on the back end--the impact on patients should always be top of mind.
That said, a mobile strategy is no good if it has no time to flourish, Scher says. "Going mobile without a full commitment to IT in general will not succeed as either a strategic plan or [a] technology initiative," he says.
Scher also calls having a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy a "pillar" of a facility's mobile strategy. He's not alone in his assessment, considering 85 percent of respondents to a survey of health IT pros released earlier this year support such a policy, as well. Roughly half of the survey's respondents indicated plans to expand or refresh their Wi-Fi networks this year, as well.
And Wi-Fi, according to a July PwC Health Research Institute report, can play a vital part in boosting patient satisfaction, which connects back to Scher's initial point. Consumers, the PwC report says, want to be able to exchange information through online and mobile channels of communication. Wi-Fi enables such exchanges.
To learn more:
- read Scher's blog post