BYOD: The Elephant in the Digital Health Technology Room

David Scher, MD,
DLS Healthcare Consulting

The Wikipedia definition of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is: “the recent trend of employees bringing personally owned mobile devices to their place of work, and using those devices to access privileged company resources such as email, file servers, and databases. Some prefer the term Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT), because it is a broader description, which not only covers the hardware device(s), but also the software used on the device.” This phenomenon is not unique to healthcare. In one recent study,Cisco found that 95% of surveyed companies allow BYODs in the workplace. It also revealed that 76% said BYOD was both somewhat or extremely positive for their companies and challenging for their IT departments. Healthcare, however, because of regulatory issues including HIPAA as well as patient safety concerns, presents unique challenges in this regard.  A recent HIMSS survey of hospital executives found that  85% of 130 hospitals embrace BYOD, 83% support the use of Apple iPads on the network, 58% currently or plan to use desktop virtualization solutions for hospital app use, 45% said they would use either home-grown or third-party apps, and 60% are supporting mobile EHR apps.

The majority of nurses, physicians, medical students and others use mobile devices for professional reasons, mainly as educational resources.  Younger healthcare providers are using medical apps at a faster rate than older ones; however the vast majority of physicians use smart phones even without utilizing mobile apps, which present BYOD issues just the same. Mobile apps will become an increasing source of medical education, office and hospital management, and patient evaluation and treatment.

An excellent recent review of issues involved in BYOD highlights companies such as IBM and Sybase which address the issue with proprietary software support.  Most medical offices and institutions cannot provide this kind of support.  Other ways of dealing with the BYOD problem are necessary. Earlier this year, the West Wireless Health Instituteestablished the West Wireless Health Council to address the issue of BYOD.  The result has been the remarkable creation of a medical grade wireless open framework which essentially creates a utility out of wireless. The technology is in pilot testing and has the potential to solve the BYOD problem at no cost.

While BYOD presents many challenges unique to healthcare, the increasing importance of mobile devices is clear.  Patient confidence in healthcare hinges significantly on the faith the public has in the security of healthcare IT tools of any sort. We must confront this big elephant in the room, and quickly.  The rate of adoption of medical apps, the expansion of healthcare IT connectivity, and the rapidly increasing amount of data being produced mandate it.

David Lee Scher, MD is a former cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist, and owner/ director at DLS HEALTHCARE CONSULTING, LLC, uniquely concentrating in advising digital health companies and their partnering institutions, providers, and businesses. A pioneer adopter of remote cardiac monitoring, he lectures worldwide promoting the benefits of digital health technologies. He can be reached at dlschermd@gmail.com, twitter at dlschermd, and linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-lee-scher-md/27/16a/90. Dr. Scher blogs at http://davidleescher.com

Comments

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