The rewards of BYOD sound so sweet: Just imagine the funds you can save on mobile devices if employees bring their own smartphones to work! Think of the savings on your cellular plan!But like many things that sound too good to be true, allowing your staff to use their own smartphones within your hospital walls requires a closer look. Rush ahead without addressing the potential pitfalls, and you may open a can of worms that will be difficult to close.
The savings from nurses, managers, lab technicians and pharmacists using their own wireless plans may have you seeing dollar signs. But what happens if those employees exceed their monthly minutes and data plans? Or if they break their phones at work? Are you willing to pick up the bill?
Imagine the consequences of a dead battery causing an alarm to go unanswered. How will you keep your staff’s smartphones charged throughout a long shift? Will you require them to purchase expensive battery packs, or will the hospital provide them? How many different types of extended batteries will you have to stock to accommodate various smartphone models?
If you’re considering the potential convenience and cost savings of a BYOD policy inside your hospital, you need to carefully consider privacy and security as well. It seems every week we hear of another major breach that costs patients their privacy and costs hospitals millions of dollars in fines. Ponemon Institute’s 2012 Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy and Data Security reports 45 percent of healthcare organizations experienced more than five data breaches within the last two years.
Keeping your data secure and ensuring HIPAA compliance will require a robust mobile device management (MDM) strategy. But even if you do develop a plan for protecting the data on your staff’s personal phones, what’s the likelihood that they will let you have access to their personal data? And how will you manage your employee directory without making personal phone numbers widely available?
On the IT side, your team will grapple with numerous other issues. If you opt for VoIP on the hospital Wi-Fi, how will you optimize for the different devices your staff uses, from iPhones to Android to Blackberry? How will you choose medical apps such as pill identifiers and medical dictionaries if those apps are not available across all devices and operating systems?
At Voalte, we address these issues with a hospital-owned, shared device. You control what devices your staff uses, what applications are on each device, and how devices run on your secure VoIP Wi-Fi network without requiring cellular plans. Hospital caregivers with Voalte phones use our enhanced texting 9-to-1 over phone calls. Our alarms work with all major nurse call and middleware players, and incorporate all the functionality these vendors require for integration.
Huge potential exists for BYOD for physicians and others working outside your hospital walls. For staff nurses and other internal hospital staff who don’t need access to patient data once their shift has ended, a shared device plan is the only way to stay in control and in compliance, and keep all the worms safely inside the can. Call us when you’re ready to consider Voalte as a proven alternative.