BYOD Trend Influences Future of Health Care Technology

More and more nurses today are bringing their own smart phones and tablets to work and using them in their day-to-day work routine, according to a recent survey by Fierce Mobile Healthcare.

The study found that 61 percent of hospitals and health systems respondents said that half their employees use personal mobile devices for work. Fifty percent said the devices are used for just email and calendar applications, while 36 percent said the devices are used to retrieve patient data.

Another report, Point of Care Computing for Nursing 2012 by the Spyglass Consulting Group, tested the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) patterns of more than 100 nurses in acute care environments in the U.S. It found that 69 percent of hospitals have nursing staffs use personal devices for work. The surveyed nurses specifically said they use their own mobile devices to streamline productivity, improve patient safety and reduce the risk of medical errors. They think using their own devices allows them to communicate better than some of the current technologies provided by the hospital.

Judith Church, DHA, MSN, faculty member in the health care and health care informatics programs at Aurora, Colo.-based American Sentinel University, said in a statement that employees that BYOD are more productive or have better job performance because they “are more comfortable with their own device, have more control over the computing environment and enjoy an enhanced sense of life-work balance.”

Nursing call systems can also be integrated into the BYOD trend, with alerts being sent directly to a nurse’s phone when the patient pushes a button. Alerts could come in the form of text messages, emails, pages or phone calls. Church said that using this type of alert system would help improve workflows. “The individual device and user prowess will contribute to optimal standardization of devices across the physical and electronic work environment,” she said.

The drawback to allowing employees to BYOD is that IT departments need to provide software to support all of the personal devices. It can also add to security and HIPAA issues associated with the mobile technology.