- AT&T, Nihon Kohden Expand Telemeter Wireless Networking Options
- New Service Could Help Hospitals with Wireless Networking Strain
At the same time, the annual survey found progress in wireless networking infrastructure compared to the 2016 survey.
In the 2016, Wi-Fi coverage was identified as a top challenge by 55 percent of respondents, a number that dropped to 47 percent in the 2019 poll. Cellular coverage was cited as a challenge by 46 percent of the 2016 poll compared to 39 percent in the 2019 survey.
Smartphones continue to be the most common mobile communication tool, used by three-quarters of hospitals. At the same time, pagers continue to be heavily used, particularly among non-clinical staff such as housekeepers, transport technicians, and dietary staff.
Physicians were the hospital staff members most often permitted to use mobile devices at 90 percent, followed by administrators (84 percent), nurses (79 percent), and IT staff (76 percent).
Nonclinical staff use pagers (53 percent), smartphones (17 percent), Wi-Fi phones (13 percent), voice badges (6 percent), and tablets (4 percent).
Three-quarters of respondents said that their organization supports at least one type of pager. Three-quarters of organizations support smartphones, 64 percent support Wi-Fi phones, 55 percent support tablets, 19 percent support voice badges, and 10 percent support smartwatches.
The participants also selected the coverage area for paging networks as “excellent” or “good” more often (65 percent) than other mobile communication devices.
Close to 80 percent of respondents said that communicating with care team members was essential function of their mobile communications devices. Two-thirds of respondents said that providing real-time clinical information and receiving actionable information such as nurse call alerts (67%) were essential functions, while 60 percent reported that sending and receiving protected health information was an essential function.
A majority of respondents said that they can use their smartphone and table to access secure texting, 49 percent said electronic health records, 48 percent said staff contact information, 46 percent said medical and/or drug reference, 41 percent said alerts from clinical systems, 39 percent said on-call schedules, 33 percent said critical test results, and 27 percent said picture archiving and communication radiology systems.
“As the survey shows, organizations continue to support a variety of devices for their communication needs,” said Vincent D. Kelly, chief executive officer of Spok. “From smartphones to smartwatches to pagers, the mix of devices confirms the need for a platform solution to unify communication across the organization.”
As wireless networking moves into the next generation of technology, the situation might improve significantly for hospital and health systems.
Wi-Fi 6 is expected to provide higher data rates, increased capacity, more robust performance with many connected devices, and improved power efficiency compared with previous Wi-Fi versions.
The 5G cellular standard promises much higher speeds and lower latency than 4G, which will not only help with medical and mobile device use in hospitals but also with telemedicine and remote care.
At the same time, upgrading to Wi-Fi 6 will involve significant investment in infrastructure and equipment, while deployment of 5G networks won’t be widely available for some time.
Healthcare organizations should adopt the next generation of wireless technologies in a coordinated way that leverages the strengths of both these innovative strategies.
