The future is mobile and hospitals are aware of this. The numerous benefits the use of mobile technologies can have in (not only) the hospital environment make them the logical next step. Making this step, however, is not without challenges.
Though mobile applications provide healthcare professionals with greater flexibility and offer them support in structuring and optimizing their workflow, in order for such systems to be of benefit, several issues need to be addressed by their manufacturers and by the hospitals‘ IT operators. These are related to their development, integration and operation, as well as maintenance.
In order to better understand the existing challenges and develop suggestions on how to overcome them, researchers from HEALTH – the Institute for Biomedicine and Health Sciences at Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH in Graz, Austria, have evaluated the existing IT infrastructure of eight hospitals. They presented their findings at Mobihealth, the 4th International Conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare that took place in Athens, Greece in November 2014.
Their research was based on GlucoTab®, a client-server system that uses a Google Android-based tablet as a frontend device for diabetes workflow and insulin decision support in hospitals.
A strong emphasis on risk assessment at every step of the development process, together with extensive documentation, testing and clinical validation has enabled them to identify several operation and integration scenarios for the system, thus making its use by hospitals more viable.
To find out more about their experiences and the details of the promising results of this research, read the whole paper here.
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