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If the future of healthcare lies in mobile technology, HIMSS is going to have to find larger meeting rooms.
Standing-room-only audiences swarmed mHIMSS-track educational sessions on the first day of the HIMSS12 Conference and Exhibition Tuesday in Las Vegas. They turned out in droves at the Venetian-Palazzo-Sands Expo Center for sessions titled “Got Smartphones? Leveraging Physicians’ Smartphone Usage in HIT,” “Engaging Employees in Wellness Using Wireless Technology” and “EHR To Go: Opportunities and Challenges to Mobile EHR Deployment.”
The mHIMSS track offers several more intriguing events today, with titles like “mHealth: From Smart Phones to Smart Systems,” “Clinical Communications and Collaboration” and “Did You Know There’s an App For That?”
The four-day conference kicked off for mHIMSS enthusiasts with “Got Smartphones?,” during which executives from Binghamton, N.Y-based United Health Services explained how they launched a mobile health platform roughly three years ago for the four-hospital system.
The platform, called iCare, now offers physicians the opportunity to view patient records, check medications and submit billing requests. The results, said Afzal ur Rehman, MD, PhD, the system’s chief medical information officer, are “ten times better than they were before” they had a mobile platform.
Rehman and Rebecca T. Kennis, CPHIMS, the health systems clinical systems analyst, explained that UHS’ iCare platform is very basic, but it’s getting rave reviews from physicians who want mobile capabilities. They hope to enhance that platform in the future with better access to data stored in the statewide health information exchange and CPOE capabilities.
Rehman said physicians especially like the billing component. The platform isn’t sophisticated enough to allow them to select specific ICD-9 codes, he said, but it does allow them to send billing information back to their office instantly. Considering the fact that physicians forget to bill about 5 percent of their hospital-based patient encounters, he said, this feature has a very definable ROI.
Both Rehman and Kennis stressed that the platform is basic because it needs to meet physicians’ needs, rather than creating a workflow burden. Kennis noted that physicians generally aren’t adopting electronic medical records because they’re too cumbersome, but recent surveys have indicated more than 80 percent do have an iPhone and more than 30 percent are using iPads for clinical purposes.
As far as security is concerned, Kennis said Apple devices are considered tokens, so that each device can be used by only one person – in other words, someone can’t borrow a physician’s iPhone and gain access to that physician’s mobile platform. In addition, there’s an auto log-off after five minutes, information is removed from the device after 48 hours, and all physicians are required to re-register their devices each year. If a device is lost or stolen, access and information can be wiped clean almost instantaneously.
Rehman said the weakest link in the healthcare information chain occurs when a physician passes on the responsibility for a patient to another physician, such as at the end of a shift. By using an iPhone to dictate hand-off notes, he said, that information is preserved and ready for the next patient encounter.
“Having full information available to them easily is a big plus,” said Rehman, who used his own iPhone to demonstrate the iCare platform. ‘A lot of physicians have said to me, ‘I’ve always wanted a reason to buy an iPhone,’ and this is it.”
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