IDC Report: How Hospitals Can Strategically Embrace Mobile Computing
VCBeat (ID: vcbeat）
Editor’s Note: International Data Corporation (IDC)International Data Corporation, a U.S.-based market research, analytics, and consulting firm, is dedicated to designing strategic development goals and analyzing marketing opportunities in the fields of information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology.) recently released a report on the application of mobile computing technologies in hospitals, outlining the crises facing traditional healthcare and providing strategies to mitigate them.
The healthcare industry has historically distinguished between how healthcare professionals and patients use mobile technology by categorizing it into clinical mobility and internet-based healthcare, but this boundary is becoming increasingly blurred today.
Driven by the backdrop of new organizational structures, the generational upgrade of mobile technologies, and their increasingly close integration with ubiquitous computing (including the Internet of Things, IoT), hospitals need to establish a mobile computing technology strategy to meet these demands.
In a report titled “IDC PlanScape: Mobile Computing Strategy for Hospitals,” IDC provides hospitals with a decision-making tool to help them clarify their vision, mission, strategic objectives, and the technological architecture required to achieve these goals under their mobile computing technology strategy.
Nowadays, healthcare is evolving toward an integrated care model, which will inevitably blur the boundaries between clinical mobile health and internet-based healthcare. This is because integrated care encompasses primary care and community-based healthcare, while also actively engaging patients themselves in the entire health management process.
By enabling broader adoption of mobile computing among hospital staff for clinical care, research, and administrative management, as well as among patients, the following objectives can be achieved:
Enable more accurate collection of health data (such as measurement results, imaging data, and clinical notes), ensuring that clinical data is readily accessible during the treatment phase to support medical decision-making.
Maximize the potential of healthcare professionals to compensate for increasingly scarce medical resources.
In the medical process, change the norm of patients' passive participation and enable them to actively engage in the entire health management process, so as to better implement preventive measures and thereby improve quality of life.
However, the report points out that implementing such a targeted mobile computing technology strategy is likely to be a daunting task, especially when considering demands from various stakeholders, including clinicians and administrators, legacy infrastructure systems, information security concerns, and other regulatory compliance requirements.
IDC believes that hospitals seeking to leverage mobile computing technologies must first conduct a thorough analysis of their needs and the benefits they can deliver, as these benefits form the foundational components of the project’s vision, mission, and strategic objectives.
In this report, IDC defines the roles and responsibilities of various stakeholders within the ICT alliance, including shareholders, administrative personnel, organizational resources, and information governance supported by mobile technologies.
“When it comes to mobility, siloed efforts by individual functional departments are no longer viable. To effectively leverage mobile computing while maintaining regulatory compliance, hospital IT professionals must cultivate appropriate capabilities, structure their organizational architecture strategically, secure necessary skills and funding, align robust architectural frameworks with delivered services, and ultimately establish a governance system to ensure the accuracy and transparency of decision-making,” said Massimiliano Claps, Research Director for IDC’s Government and Healthcare Insights practice.
A mobile computing technology strategy enables more efficient service delivery tailored to the needs of different user groups. Compared with their peers, hospitals that fail to effectively implement a mobile computing technology strategy face heightened risks, including declines in service quality, operational efficiency, and satisfaction among both staff and patients. This IDC report outlines step-by-step approaches to mitigating these risks.
Compiled by Zhou Yanxun
Edited by: Mo Renying