Healthcare, Healthcare, Healthcare – The Marcia Brady of the Mobility Space?

Healthcare, healthcare, healthcare. It’s like the mobile industry’s own Marcia Brady these days, as more and more attention is being given to mHealth. Just yesterday, we posted an interesting article about what happens when doctors lose their smart devices. But, healthcare mobility issues go beyond losing devices and extends to much higher-level mobility strategy. In May 2010, Gartner’s John Lovelock stated that healthcare CIOs were lagging when it came to having a sound strategy for enterprise mobility in place. CIOs stated that they were hoping one mobile platform or OS would emerge for management purposes. While no single platform has emerged as the clear winner, things are changing when it comes to mobility in healthcare.

“Mobile is certainly still one [area of health IT] that needs to be on that list of what’s coming. It’s here, but it’s still coming. We are just seeing the beginning of that. This is going to be something that is going to become much more significant,” said HIMSS CEO H. Stephen Lieber in an interview with MobiHealthNews.

We’ve mentioned that there doesn’t seem to be one clear platform winner, but Apple’s iPad is really making a big case for its place in the healthcare mobile ecosystem. According to an article in Wired, the Veterans Administration is looking to deploy 100,000 iPads across 152 locations and with the announcement of the iPad 3, CIOs will need to assess where it fits within their mobile ecosystem. Once they assess where it fits in, the bigger question becomes, “How do we manage it?”

For obvious reasons, security is a big issue in the healthcare mobile ecosystem and management extends beyond the physical device. As the BYOD phenomenon spills over into the healthcare sector, employees want their own devices to have network access. While the iPad and other slick handheld products get most of the attention with healthcare mobility, CIOs can’t forget about the management of other endpoints that are in the ecosystem: printers, ruggedized handhelds, routers, access points, etc.

If you’re an IT professional in the healthcare field, are you mindful to buy and consider products that can manage multiple platforms and OSes? Do you think multiple platform management is important? We’d love to hear your opinion.

-BH

A Follow-Up on BYOD

We held a webinar on Avalanche Telicost and how rTEM is becoming a key element in a modern-day MDM solution. One of the questions that popped up centered on “bring your own device” (BYOD) and what it is/what it means to the enterprise. Quite frankly, there is A LOT of buzz going on about it and as such, I wanted to share what I consider a very good, concise breakdown of what it means, and how it correlates to another common MDM buzz-phrase: consumerization of IT.

In particular, check out the section on “IT-ization of the Consumer.” Really good stuff. Hope you check it out! Make sure you check out the newest selection of webinars we just added, by clicking here.
 

10 Lessons for Managing Mobile Devices via Forrester

I know this is slightly behind us (Sept.), but I thought I’d share on the heels of our webinar yesterday, which discussed MDM for the Entire Enterprise and the current state of the MDM landscape. The article comes via Network World and is a run-down of the top 10 lessons learned about managing mobile devices. I won’t spoil any of the 10 lessons because it’s a good, quick read, but take a look and tell us what you think in the comments, or on Twitter or Facebook!

10 Lessons for Managing Mobile Devices, via Network World and Forrester

 

Healthcare CIO’s and Mobile Devices: What’s the Problem?

For those of you getting ready for the Holiday weekend, we hope you have a great weekend! But, for those who are not celebrating – or haven’t left the office just yet – we wanted to pass along a good read about MDM in the Healthcare.

InformationWeek had an article yesterday on the problems healthcare CIO’s are facing when it comes to the proliferation of mobile devices in the healthcare space. The article points out many of the common themes we are hearing (especially when it comes to BYOD) about smart-device management. However, it brings up an interesting point that is often overlooked when the smartphone/tablet/smart-device conversation comes up: what is their effect on the WLAN? Not only do you have extra demand on information traveling to-and-from, but you also need to make sure that the extraordinary amounts of data are secure.

As the article explains, “The ‘bring your own device,’ or BYOD, phenomenon in hospitals has created a networking problem for CIOs by driving up demand on wireless LANs and has kept security officers busy because it’s difficult to control all the data that flows to hundreds or thousands of handheld computers…”

The piece has a lot of interesting information, so if you’re looking for a quick read before you’re off for a long weekend, we suggest you check it out! Also, if you’re interested in learning more about smart-device MDM, check out our upcoming webinar here.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!