A Healthcare IT Guide To The Power of Enterprise Mobility

There are few workplaces as reliant on mobility as the healthcare sector, and the rapid access to expanded knowledge is a vital key not only to positive outcomes. Still, it can potentially be a matter of life and death.

This is why healthcare organizations, rely heavily on enterprise mobility to function and perform their tasks effectively.

In fact, the healthcare sector was an early adopter of mobility technology, being an early adopter of pager technology and continuing to use it for decades after the end of its mainstream use in other sectors.

However, in the wake of a change from somewhat outdated technology to a more robust enterprise mobility system, there is an opportunity for IT managers in the healthcare sector to adopt a strong system of technologies that can help improve patient outcomes and help make it easier for doctors and nurses to do what they do best.

With that in mind, here are some ways in which enterprise mobility improves the healthcare sector and how to take full advantage of this.

Optimizing Workflows And Efficiency

One of the biggest goals for IT managers in the healthcare industry is streamlining workflows and avoiding the problem of siloing, which can make it harder for doctors to do what they need to do and potentially lead to potential warning signs of major issues being missed.

This is where enterprise mobility solutions come in to help optimize, automate, and simplify a wide range of vital processes to ensure the effective maintenance of patients and improve outcomes.

These include automated processes for scheduling appointments with doctors and specialists without the need for manual intervention to avoid clashes, allowing for automatic repeat appointments and making it easier for patients to rearrange, saving time and avoiding wasted resources.

Mobility applications also allow for automated billing, invoicing, and payment systems, which streamline the process of getting people the care they need and doctors the vital funding they need to continue to treat patients.

Finally, enterprise mobility helps to manage prescriptions, from sending electronic prescriptions to pharmacies to setting up repeat prescriptions that can be easily monitored and updated to meet clinical needs.

These are just three massive examples of routine systems that can be automated through mobility software to reduce the need for manual intervention, saving time and labor that can be better utilized elsewhere in the system.

This allows IT managers to enhance the efficiency of their operations and enable professionals to focus on their patients and provide the best possible outcomes, improving their health in the process and passing those cost savings onto their patients and insurance providers.

Ensuring Data Security and Compliance

Protecting patients’ data is not only a legal requirement under regulatory standards such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act 1996 (HIPAA) but also an ethical concern that is a practical necessity to ensure patients’ continued health.

Patient data needs to be connected and accessible by any doctor who requires that access to provide the right treatments and prescriptions without the risk of undermining their health. Still, it also needs to be achieved in a secure and safe way.

This is where mobility solutions come in to empower IT managers in healthcare with the ability to quickly add strong security measures that will protect patient data from people attempting to access it without being authorized to do so.

These include secure authentication protocols, encrypted connections to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks and data interception, and other security features required by state and federal healthcare regulations.

This ensures that confidential data stays confidential, ensures that both patients and doctors alike have peace of mind, and avoids providing an incentive to malicious actors such as ransomware-as-a-service that attempt to monetize the theft of confidential data through blackmail.

At the same time, it reduces the barrier to treatment, helping to achieve the best of both worlds of maximizing security and protecting patient information without requiring overly complex and counterproductive methods to get access to information, slowing treatments down.

It also reduces the potential for human error and mistakes, by providing systems where it is more difficult to share information unsafely.

Monitoring and Analytics for Performance Improvement

The healthcare sector is one of the most data-driven industries in the world, and data analytics are important not only for improving operational efficiency but also for providing a better quality of service for patients and, thus, providing better long-term health outcomes.

Enterprise mobility solutions allow companies to easily analyze patient outcome data to form trends and patterns, alongside wide-spanning access to resource utilization data and the ability to produce instant real-time reports on the efficiency of services.

All of these data-driven insights allow for much more informed and strategic decision-making by doctors and managers of healthcare organizations as well as identifying areas for potential improvement and development.

This is not only a useful source of information, but in a healthcare industry that is often exceptionally competitive, analytics for performance improvement and improving access for patients are critical for healthcare services to survive and thrive.

The best part of this is that this data can either be accessed through self-service systems directly by healthcare professionals or can be requested, and these requests are easily processed and automated to provide the right information at the right time.

Flexibility and Scalability

Whilst scalability is a common concern with any small business that builds up enough of a customer, user, or patient base to require expansion, in the healthcare sector, the appropriate flexibility to expand is a requirement to ensure that an appropriate level of service can be maintained.

The best systems are those that grow with the business, starting out small and manageable but allowing for the ability to spread as far as a business needs to and incorporate new technologies, organizational systems, and infrastructure into the workflow without causing significant disruption or requiring extensive and expensive upgrades.

Enterprise mobility can help with this, and ensure that in the fast-paced healthcare industry, organizations can stay one step ahead and maintain an agile mindset that evolves as healthcare does and effectively incorporates the rapid developments of medical research.

For many startups, new businesses, and small businesses, that first surge in demand is one of the best and worst times for the company, and it is where every single decision they make will matter so significantly.

There is a tipping point where a business will either expand too quickly and have capacity they can neither meet nor afford in the long term or, conversely, have too much demand for their limited infrastructure to match.

Having scalable enterprise solutions allows businesses to avoid as much as possible either fate, enabling more graduated developments that match the demand or that can quickly be adjusted to meet surging needs.

Empowering Healthcare Professionals

Much has been noted about the power that enterprise mobility gives to IT managers working in the healthcare sector to make their lives easier and help them to focus on the most vital parts of their jobs.

However, it would be remiss to neglect that these systems also provide a lot of additional capabilities and control to healthcare professionals to help them do their jobs to the best of their ability without technological restraints getting in the way.

Mobility solutions allow doctors access to secure, critical information in a quickly accessible way, enable collaboration both within an organization and with other healthcare professionals and organizations, and provide tools to make workflows more streamlined and easy to follow.

All of these aspects directly improve patient outcomes, enabling closer, connected decision-making, but beyond the practical, there are other ways in which this empowerment improves healthcare.

A streamlined workplace where structures, infrastructure and systems serve to make the completion of vital work frictionless is not only good because more work is done with less exertion, but it also creates a positive work environment.

Employees and healthcare professionals are far more motivated to work within systems that seem to have been implemented for their benefit, and this increases productivity, improves motivation, and leads to better job satisfaction.

A small but still important part of this is that mobility systems tend to be cross-platform, allowing healthcare professionals and IT managers a choice of devices to use as their primary tool without going through complex calibration processes.

This, in turn, reduces costs due to a lack of employee turnover, improves consistency, and ultimately makes patient care at the end of the process better than it would otherwise be without it.

The right systems focusing on enterprise mobility, flexibility, and agility can provide this to a healthcare organization and its patients.