85% of hospitals embracing BYOD

Hospitals are embracing 'Bring-Your-Own-Device' initiatives, however with varying levels of access to business applications, according to a survey of the networking priorities of more than 130 healthcare IT pros.

A survey of the networking priorities of 130 hospitals found that about 85% support the use of personal devices like iPads, Blackberries and Android smartphones at work.

The survey, performed by Aruba Networks , focused mainly on network issues and showed varying levels of access to business apps through employees' devices.

The 85% who indicated they support physician

Of the 85% who indicated they support physician and staff use of personal devices at work, 53% said that the workers are currently relegated to Internet access only, during 24% provide limited access to hospital applications.

Seventy-six percent of respondents said they provide Internet access to patients and visitors, with 58% doing so through open networks without password protection. Seventy-five percent as well noted that their hospital applications are available remotely to clinics, physicians and others.

In November, innovation firm IDC Health Insights conducted its own survey of 50 healthcare CIOs -- 25 in the U.S. and 25 in Western Europe. The results were similar to those found by Aruba Networks.

The IDC survey

In the IDC survey, 40% said staff could connect into the hospital's production network with their own devices, 24% allow physicians to use their own device nevertheless only to access the Internet, 12% said staff could use a personal device yet not connect to any network and 4% allow no personal devices.

"Certain bring-your-own-device strategies present certain security risks: the introduction of mobile malware onto a hospital network, for instance," said Lynne Dunbrack, IDC Health Insights program director.

Aruba's survey as well indicated that electronic medical records applications are by a long way the most-often supported applications on mobile devices, with 60% of respondents indicating that's what they were allowing employees to connect to through their devices. EMRs were followed by PACS, Secure Messaging, and Voice over IP, each in the 30% range.

Increasing issue for us in the past year

"BYOD has actually become an increasing issue for us in the past year," Bryan Safrit, a senior network architect for Rex Healthcare in North Carolina, said in a statement. "Much more of the traffic we see is from iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Without the ability to differentiate users and enforce policies, our BYOD traffic could overwhelm our bandwidth."

An overwhelming majority of the respondents to the Aruba survey indicated they support the use of Apple iPads and iPhones; Blackberries were as well more popular than Android smart phones.

The most highly supported

IDC's November survey as well showed iOS devices were the most highly supported, followed by Blackberries, Windows phones, Android OS devices, Symbian OS 4.5%, and others 2.3%. The remaining 13.6% of those surveyed by IDC said they had no preferred mobile platform.

Desktop virtualization was as well highly touted as a supporting innovation for BYOD infrastructures. In the Aruba survey, 58% said that they currently use or plan to use desktop virtualization solutions just as Citrix to enable hospital application use on iPads; 45% said they would use in-house or third-party applications.

Ninety-three percent of respondents said they run their own network infrastructure, as opposed to outsourcing it to a network service provider

The survey revealed that 50% of respondents plan to expand or refresh their Wi-Fi infrastructure over the at once year; during 35% said the same for their wired networks.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com .