More healthcare IT support needed

Plenty of doctors are using Apple iPads, nevertheless not many of the tablet computers are outfitted with enterprise network and data access, according to a new survey from Spyglass Consulting Group.

That is changing as early adopters, just as Ottawa Hospital in Ontario, show the way. The hospital has deployed 3,000 iPads for physicians, with an upgraded Wi-Fi network from Aruba Networks, and a major investment in native iOS applications. And this week AT&T announced its AT&T Developer Center ForHealth, which combines a mobility infrastructure, cloud services, developer portal and APIs to speed writing mobile apps, for healthcare staff and patients, that can pull at the same time patient and clinical information from a variety of stand-alone systems. [For additional details, see mk-mobility-solutions.]

The Spyglass interviews were conducted this past summer, and are part of a fuller report, "Point-of-Care Computing for Physicians 2012," written by Spyglass founder and principal, Gregg Malkary. The full report is for sale, available from Spyglass.

The reason, says Malkary, is that the range of needed tools are missing. Those include enterprise healthcare applications that so far have not been revamped with the iPad in mind. As a result, many in healthcare rely on existing Citrix-based virtualization infrastructures to access Windows-based clinical applications and data from mobile devices, according to Malkary.

"However to do that, you have to dial out over the guest network to get back into the hospital network: You're not natively on the hospital's network," he says.

Major IT refocus

That meant a major IT refocus: The Wi-Fi network had to be upgraded, the hospital had to invest in native iOS application development, and coming up to speed on mobile device management, which Potter calls a "massive topic."

Technology has transformed the broader world of business software and consumer applications. Workers now interact through mobile devices and social media, and applications are increasingly connected at the same time over the web. However many ERP deployments have remained oblivious to these tectonic changes-it's as if the iPhone was never invented, social media was a futuristic concept and connecting ERP to web channels was a kooky concept for the dabbling few.