IT Advantage

Vocera Mobile Maturity Model for Healthcare

A Framework For Clinical Mobility Assessment And Planning

Introduction

Over the past six years, healthcare has seen a dramatic increase in the volume of mobile and smartphone devices in use in hospitals by staff and patients alike. The sweeping transition to and adoption of these devices gives rise to a high impact trend shaping the mobile-enabled transformation of the healthcare enterprise: The emergence of Clinical Communication & Collaboration (CC&C) as an indispensable product category for the modern health system¹. As health systems start to look beyond their EHRs for further value at the point-of-care to improve quality and productivity, CC&C solutions offer an intuitive path, leveraging the power of mobile experiences to help care teams achieve better outcomes while improving the experience of care.

With the aid of smartphone enabled applications, we can now seamlessly connect the extended care team across inpatient and outpatient settings on a real-time basis. This level of connectivity can deliver significant value such as improving the timeliness of care, and patient, care team and clinical context consistency across hand-offs. However, successful adoption and use of mobile technologies in the healthcare industry still faces significant challenges.

Fragmentation continues to be the norm across infrastructure, devices, integration points, applications, and clinical workflows. In fact, frontline users of mobile devices and applications are already experiencing an increase in workflow fragmentation. A recent HIMSS Analytics study noted that the average clinician has to navigate at least five different devices and application modalities in order to communicate and collaborate with the rest of the care team throughout their shift². High levels of fragmentation and the general lack of a comprehensive mobility strategy hinders the industry’s progress toward sustainable mobility investments and ushering the clinical communication and collaboration category forward.

As health system IT and clinical organizations respond to the rapidly evolving trends in both CC&C and app-enabled patient engagement, we are observing the need for a clear framework for assessing an organization’s mobile maturity. This framework can inform a cohesive clinical communication and collaboration strategy that aligns the appropriate people, processes, and technologies to deliver an optimized mobile experience for staff and patients alike. Therefore, we are proposing this inaugural version of the Vocera® Mobile Maturity Model for Healthcare® to help our colleagues and customers organize strategic and operational planning for a successful mobility journey.