The growth of technology in healthcare is causing many organizations to improve a mobile strategy.
This finding originates from part one of a two-part Spok report. Titled “The Evolution of Mobile Strategies in Healthcare,” part one acmes a number of key points in Spok’s yearly survey. The survey outcomes include responses from more than 300 U.S. healthcare professionals, which were collected in February 2017. 35% of respondents held various hospital roles such as quality directors, risk managers, mobility engineers and infection prevention specialists. Another 22% of respondents were physicians, 13% were nurses, 10% were IT staff members and 7% were executive leaders.
All the respondents answered questions about their organization’s mobile strategy; though their responses regarding the definition of “mobile strategy” varied across the board. For simplicity’s sake, Spok defined a mobile strategy as something that “brings together elements of security, communications and technology in a collective plan to improve staff productivity and enhance patient care.”
The review results show 65 percent of the organizations have a documented mobile strategy in place. This number has been steadily increasing through the years. In Spok’s similar 2014 survey, only 44 percent of organizations had a mobile strategy. In its 2012 survey, even fewer organizations (34 percent) had a mobile strategy.
Of the 65 percent that currently possesses a mobile strategy, 21 percent have had it for less than one year. Forty percent have had a documented mobile strategy for between one and three years, and 14 percent have had it for between three and five years. The remaining 25 percent of respondents said their organization has had a mobile strategy for more than five years.
Among the establishments that have had a mobile strategy in place for more than a year, many have modernized their strategy since its initial creation. According to respondents, the update curtailed from reasons such as the altering needs of end users, the availability of new mobile devices, new capabilities from their EHR vendor and alterations to strategic goals. Twenty-three percent of respondents said they were unsure of any apprises to the strategy, and 7 percent supposed their organization has not updated its strategy. But the execution of a mobile strategy isn’t the only significant factor.
Are the implemented strategies being assessed and reviewed? Not really. Only 32% of respondents said their organization has a formal review procedure for evaluating the achievement of projects such as mobile enablement. The remaining 68% said their organization does not have a formal evaluation process.
While the amount of organizations with a documented mobile strategy has been cumulating since 2012, organizations should yield a closer look at how to assess and recover their mobile strategies after implementation.