When Healthcare Fails to Align with the Right Mobile Solution

Healthcare mobile devices are the mainstay of the clinician, staff, and patient interaction in hospitals, clinics and other healthcare workplaces. Healthcare providers use this technology to access information quickly from anywhere and stay connected to patients and one another, which drives efficiencies and improves the speed and quality of patient care.

The healthcare environment demands the highest level of efficiency, speed, durability and security. When healthcare workers have all the data they need in the palm of their hands, they can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time caring for patients. Mobile devices are used for¹

·      Information management. Note-taking, audio recording, photography, ebook access and cloud services.

·      Time management. Appointments, meetings, call recordings.

·      Health record maintenance. Access to electronic records, acc to scans/x-rays, electronic prescribing, billing.

·      Communications. Voice and video calling, messaging, email, video conferencing, social networking.

·      Reference. Medical literature, search portals, drug reference guides, medical news.

·      Patient monitoring. Rehab assessment, heart monitoring, clinical data collection.

·      Medical education & training. Continuous assessment, board exam preparation, case studies, e-learning, surgical simulation.

With hundreds of thousands of mobile devices now requiring access to a healthcare network, it is no surprise that mobile data security and HIPAA compliance have become two of the biggest concerns for CIOs, CISOs, Compliance Officers and Healthcare IT professionals.¹ Healthcare workers need a secure mobility solution they can take with them anywhere, which can be updated on the spot. That device must interface succinctly with point-of-care delivery, documentation and identification functions seamlessly.

Often the discussion centers around whether to purchase consumer vs. healthcare enterprise mobile devices. Choosing a suitable device for your healthcare environment comes from evaluating a variety of quantifiable variables. The result is a mobile deployment that can increase workforce/workflow productivity, task accuracy, and measurable return on investment (ROI).

As VDC Research explains, not all mobile solutions are equal. "Failing to align the 'right' mobile solutions with the target application or use case can expose organizations to significantly higher cost of ownership. This places a premium on reliability for business-critical solutions to minimize the disruptive impact of solution failure and visibility to quickly identify and respond to problems that do arise." ²

This whitepaper will review some of the essential differences between consumer and healthcare enterprise mobile devices and their total cost of ownership (TCO). 

At Honeywell, we focus on helping you provide high-quality patient care and supporting you in your patient-centered approach. This includes the latest technology that is purpose-built for the clinical environment. Together, with our strong partnerships with healthcare leaders, we're facilitating an ongoing technology evolution and redefining what's possible for healthcare organizations of all shapes and sizes. We believe the most innovative technology knows how to stay out of your way, so you can focus on what's most important – delivering the best-in-class care your patients expect.

Let's look at three common healthcare scenarios where healthcare clinicians depend on Honeywell solutions.  

Strengthening the Supply Chain through Automation

In the wake of the global health crisis, which has caused operational strains on healthcare systems, supply chain management has never been more critical. In addition to hospital staff facing an already overwhelming workload, acute shortages of supplies can further hamstring the efforts of clinicians. The good news: there are comprehensive, effective solutions to these supply and demand challenges.

Forty-five percent of frontline providers say that manual supply chain tasks have a negative impact on patient care.³ That's because, according to some studies, clinicians can spend up to 20 percent of their day hunting for supplies such as medications. ⁴ To help alleviate the bottlenecks associated with the supply chain, healthcare systems need to implement processes that ensure clinicians have the supplies they need when they are needed. Automation and collaboration are the keys to ensuring supplies are never in short supply.

Leveraging technology can help automate and manage the supply chain from end to end, with the speed and efficiency needed in clinical operations. We engineer devices that are compatible with supply chain software, so healthcare staff can quickly and accurately track and manage inventory levels, trigger backfills, and provide analytics to the greater care team within a healthcare system, optimizing workflows throughout the entire network.

The automation of the asset-management processes empowers clinicians to focus less on organizing supplies, labeling units, and tracking down orders, and focus more time delivering high-quality care to the patients they serve. To learn more about how Honeywell can help you optimize supply chain tasks, request a no-obligation workflow assessment tailored to your organization's specific needs.

Why Innovative Technology is Imperative to Bedside Care

Your bedside clinicians—especially nurses—are at the front line of providing care to patients. They are among the first faces patients see, and the faces they become most familiar with for the duration of their treatment.

Suffice it to say, bedside touchpoints are critically important to patient care. But in addition to providing reassurance and comfort to patients and their families, care teams are tasked with EMR data entry and management, specimen collection, alarms management—the list goes on. One of the most vital of the clinician's day-to-day tasks, however, is the drug administration that happens within the bedside workflow.

When considering the Five Rights of medication administration—right patient, right time, right medication, right dose, and right delivery—there is a massive amount of liability associated with medical errors. Nurses will often have to revert to manual data input when bedside technologies are not working properly—for example, when a scanner can't scan a wristband, or its battery is dead. This doesn't just create additional work for already-busy staff and delays in care for patients. Some studies indicate that the cost of medical errors in the U.S. amount to roughly $20 billion and 100,000 lives annually.⁵

That's why it's imperative that bedside technology works the first time, and every time. For your clinician workflows, being encumbered with outdated, faulty technologies is not an option. There are lives on the line. The solution to this problem is reliable and purpose-built technology optimized for healthcare: scanners with an industry-leading margin of error of >1% that can read even the smallest of barcodes, and MedTech Breakthrough award-winning mobile computers.

We have spent our 75-year healthcare tenure designing technology optimizations just like these. We engineer solutions that drive efficiency, accuracy, and safety across bedside workflows, providing healthcare systems value by saving time, helping to prevent costly clinical errors, and improving the clinician and patient experience.

If you're wondering how it all works, ask one of our solution experts to show you how we help to transform patient care, clinician confidence, workflow efficiency, and even cybersecurity through a no-obligation workflow assessment.

Reduce Manual Errors, and Keep Lab Work Flowing

The laboratory workflow begins from the moment a clinician orders a test for a patient. From that point, the stream of information needs to flow smoothly from the clinician to the physicians, to laboratory technicians, to phlebotomists, and to patients. Throughout the process, lab techs are inundated with barcodes: They scan each specimen as they enter the lab to confirm receipt. They scan individual vials to confirm patient identities and information. They scan samples to create duplicate labels.

With constant, manually input data flowing in and out of the laboratory, there is ample room for miscommunication, mislabeling, and misreading. An interrupted stream of data is a barrier to care, meaning delays in care for patients, as well as bottlenecks to provider productivity. These pitfalls have significant, critical impacts on hospitals: miscommunications within healthcare systems have cost hospitals $1.7 billion—and nearly 2,000 lives. ⁶

Automating laboratory processes like ordering tests, entering test data, and supporting access to that data at the bedside can help improve the success of the laboratory. In fact, according to industry studies, the automation of tasks has the potential to reduce medical errors by up to 50%.⁵

These optimizations, in turn, benefit the entire care system. With access to quicker, more accurate results from the lab, clinicians can pass along valuable information to patients, their families, and surrounding care teams.

Honeywell Full Lineup of Healthcare Solutions

At Honeywell, we are a little biased toward the enterprise spectrum. We have millions of enterprise-grade devices the world over in every conceivable environment and workflow.

Honeywell's healthcare enterprise devices provide multi-purpose utility in an ergonomic form factor, driving improved productivity for your clinicians/mobile workers and a lower total cost of ownership for your business.               

Our mobile computers combine the advantages of consumer devices and the purpose-built enterprise computers into a single package. Like consumer devices, Honeywell devices are designed with the user in mind, and they provide targeted functionality, a tactical keypad, and enhanced connectivity. Because the devices are touch-based, they are more familiar to the user, which improves speed to productivity.

All of our Android devices are built on Honeywell's Mobility Edge™, a unified hardware and software platform for all form factors. It allows for rapid deployments, enhanced performance, and adaptability to changing needs. With Mobility Edge, a one-time investment in setup, deployment, and provisioning is reusable across all devices.

Why does healthcare enterprise equipment last longer? Healthcare enterprise equipment usually lasts twice as long as consumer devices because the devices

purpose-built for mission-critical situations and includes features such as:

·      A display optimized for viewing in bright sunshine

·      Screen response optimized for use while wearing gloves

·      A design that works well in a broad range of temperatures

·      A design that works in dusty, as well as damp, environments

·      A superior scanning functionality for barcodes, compared with camera-based options, which produces faster per-scan times and fewer rescans

·      Long battery life that usually supports an entire shift, exchangeable batteries, and multidevice charging solutions

·      Improved device survivability, which is essential when employees depend entirely on the device, and the cost of downtime due to a device failure is high.

Honeywell has been working closely with our healthcare customers to ensure that they have the resources they need to address the frontline issues in real-time. We provide hardware, software and connected solutions that streamline workflows and improves clinician well-being, so you can focus on what's important—patient care. We deliver on this promise through industry-leading mobile computers, data capture devices, cloud-based software and automation solutions.

To learn how to help transform your patient care through the latest technology solutions, contact a Honeywell representative at 800-537-6945.

¹The Use of Mobile Devices in Healthcare

https://www.psqh.com/analysis/the-use-of-mobile-devices-in-healthcare/

² VDC Research Group, Inc. | Enterprise Mobility, "Total Cost of Ownership Models for Line of Business Mobile Solutions," December 2018.

³ https://www.cardinalhealth.com/content/dam/corp/web/documents/infographic/CardinalHealth_SurveyInfographic_2019.pdf

⁴ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6371290/

⁵ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK49995

⁶ https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/healthcare/healthcare-miscommunication-cost-1-7b-and-nearly-2-000-lives