Clinical Mobility: The Future of Healthcare

Clinical Mobility: What is it?

Clinical Mobility is a comprehensive term. You can see it as Enterprise Mobility, but then focused on healthcare. In short, Clinical Mobility is the use of mobile devices by doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals at the point-of-care (usually the patient’s bed). These mobile devices can range from mobile terminals and tablets to mobile printers.

Clinical Mobility benefits

Many procedures at a patient’s bedside are still done manually. Such as updating the status or entering blood values. These are error-prone operations. Where human hands are involved, mistakes can always be made.

Clinical Mobility replaces these manual and error-sensitive procedures with digital solutions. If you capture information digitally, you can register it in real-time. This not only leads to fewer errors, but also to significant time savings for healthcare professionals. The advantages of this are in short:

• accurate patient identification
• better streamlined processes
• better quality of care
• more insight and overview

How does Clinical Mobility work?

When your healthcare institution uses Clinical Mobility, you use mobile devices instead of a fixed workstation. This gives healthcare professionals access to patient data, lab results and allergy information even at the bedside. By not having to constantly walk up and down to a workstation, they have more time to actually provide care.

But how exactly does the use of mobile devices in healthcare work? With these solutions, healthcare professionals have mobile access to the EPD (electronic patient record). There are currently two EPD suppliers that dominate the market: ChipSoft (Netherlands) and Epic (USA). Both vendors have developed a mobile application, with which their EPD system can be accessed on the go.

Clinical Mobility in practice

The use of Clinical Mobility has a positive influence on daily care. It takes up a lot of time when healthcare professionals can only access the EPD via the workstation. They have to walk away from the bedside to get information, which reduces their ability to pay attention to the patient. In addition, they regularly have to wait for a colleague to finish using the workstation, which further increases the risk of errors.

Mobile devices remove these obstacles. As a result, there is more time to actually provide care at the bedside. There are many applications available for healthcare professionals to view and edit information.

With Clinical Mobility, processes are streamlined and work can be done more efficiently. For example, patients can be identified digitally by scanning their wristbands with a mobile device. Because this check is digital, the four-eye principle is no longer necessary and a healthcare professional can do the patient identification alone. This cuts the workload in half, freeing up valuable time.

Enterprise or standard smartphone?

In principle, these applications work on any decent smartphone. However, it is better to use special Enterprise devices designed for use in healthcare. An ordinary smartphone does not have all the functions that an Enterprise device has.

A major advantage of Enterprise devices: they are easier to manage. They also have an advanced scanner built in, which is not the case with smartphones.

In addition, the Enterprise devices for the healthcare sector have a special Healthcare housing. This housing can be cleaned and disinfected with the cleaning agents commonly used in healthcare without damaging them. Finally, places where bacilli can accumulate, such as connectors or entrances, are sealed off.