Study: Medical Centers Making Significant Investments in Smartphone-Based Communications

Spyglass Consulting Group recently released its health care study entitled "Large-Scale Smartphone-Based Deployments Enable Hospitalwide Communications." The study shows that 63% 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. 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 44% 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. "While initial deployments are often limited to support clinical messaging between nurses and their support staff within targeted medical departments," says Gregg Malkary, managing director of the Spyglass Consulting Group, "many organizations quickly expand the scope and usage models to include all hospital workers and workflows across medical departments, standalone hospitals, and ambulatory environments and clinics."

Spyglass also identified four critical success factors for hospital IT to consider when widely deploying a smartphone-based communications platform:

• Scalability: Deploying a highly reliable, manageable, and scalable platform to support mission-, patient- and life-critical communications.

• Interoperability: Integrating with hospital IT systems infrastructure including the hospital's PBX, clinical information systems, biomedical devices, and nurse call system to support data driven closed-loop communications.

• Multidevice Support: Providing support for hospital-owned smartphones, personally-owned smartphones (BYOD), and a desktop computer interface for enhancing and expanding care team collaboration within the hospital and across the community.

• Hospital Leadership: Driving widespread end user adoption through hospital administration leadership, commitment, and investment.

"Large-Scale Smartphone-Based Deployments Enable Hospitalwide Communications" identifies the market opportunities and challenges for hospitals and health systems to consider when widely deploying a smartphone-based communications platform to support nurses, patient care team members, and other mobile workers across the health care enterprise. In January 2016, Spyglass interviewed 19 leading-edge hospitals and health systems nationwide who had successfully deployed a large number of smartphones to support mission and patient-critical communications. The complete market study is available for free from Spyglass Consulting Group at www.spyglass-consulting.com/spyglass_comp_paper.

Source: Spyglass Consulting Group