BYOD in Healthcare

Practice of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) allows healthcare employees to bring and use their personal devices such as tablets, smartphones and laptops into the work place. Their belief is that these devices boost morale and increase efficiency and productivity levels.

With BYOD, healthcare providers can use and access hospital information and applications on their personal devices. However, healthcare facilities in the US and around the world continue to struggle with whether staff should use their personal mobile devices at work. While staff can use and access organization’s information and applications on their own device, use of personal devices has brought a variety of security threats for healthcare industries.

According to a recent study, 4 out of 5 doctors regularly use their personal mobile devices in their workplace for health care purposes. It is with no doubt that these devices have been proven to have a variety of benefits such as fast access to medical records. However, there also exist some serious concerns and disadvantages associated with these devices.

This article will examine BYOD polices, BYOD use, and challenges associated with it.

BYOD Use

It is important to know that BYOD healthcare has created a number of efficiency and data security challenges for healthcare IT department. However, this does not discourage embracing wireless technology in healthcare organizations. Instead, the ongoing revolution in BYOD healthcare should be looked upon as an opportunity that gives providers and patients easy access to social media and also download the latest smartphone apps.

When done in the right way, BYOD can offer an opportunity to improve patient care. Major uses of BYOD in healthcare include:

·         Offering perfect patient care experience

·         Enhancing access to healthcare information by physicians

·         Enhancing collaboration, care coordination and communication in healthcare

·         Enhancing patient, guest and physician satisfaction

·         Improving workflow processes.

According to recent study, 71% of hospitals have allowed BYOD compared to 58% hospitals in 2016. The study also shows that 63% doctors and 43% nurses use their personal devices for work even if BYOD is prohibited in their hospitals. On the other hand, 38% physicians and 59% nurses prefer using hospital-issued devices.

BYOD use by role

According to a recent study conducted in 2017, healthcare providers use their own devices if the hospital allows it or not. Below are statistics that covers BYOD use by the role of the healthcare practitioner:

·         Transport staff- 22%

·         Housekeeping staff- 31%

·         Nurses- 43%

·         Administrators- 49%

·         Nurse practitioners- 53%

·         Information technology staff- 54%

·         Physicians 62%

BYOD challenges

 With the rise of BYOD in healthcare and residing of data on smartphones, desktops, tablets, USB drivers and laptops, it means the process of protecting private information is more complex. The process of keeping data safe while accessing healthcare information from any device is complex and can pose dangers to healthcare IT. Below are the most pressing BYOD challenges you should know:

• Data security

According to recent study, 69% of healthcare practitioners use their devices for both medical and personal communication. This brings a lot of pressure in the healthcare industry because of end-user devices accessing hospital networks. This means that there must be data insecurity if hospital data is not well secured. Privacy of healthcare professionals is also undermined if personal devices are used in the workplace. BYOD has been found to cause privacy risks during personal communications.

•         Infrastructure Wi-Fi coverage

Despite having sensitive data in hospital databases, there is still insecure wireless networks which cannot support multiple devices.

•        Compliance with regulations

Complying with regulations such as HITECH and HIPAA has become a great challenge when implementing BYOD policies.

•      Infrastructure cellular coverage

Hospital wireless networks cannot support or control thousands of devices used in healthcare.

Tips for a Successful BYOD Healthcare

In case you are planning to implement a BYOD solution, here is a list of 5main components that can bring successful BYOD implementation into your organization wireless network:

•        Security for next generation

This applies to new generation users who have new apps and security threats that can pose a big risk to hospital wireless network. Use of traditional firewalls is not applicable anymore. This means that nextgeneration security is a must. Next generation security assimilates apps identification and control, intrusion prevention and firewall enabling BYOD users have safe use of applications without any threats. Next generation firewalls prevent data leakage, stop threats and also conserve network performance.

•          Secure wireless network

For a successful BYOD support in hospitals, there should be a widespread wireless access with suitable coverage and a capacity that is able to support millions of devices. Hospitals should also ensure that their wireless networks are secure against any outbound and inbound attacks. Since there is so much sensitive data in hospitals, secure wireless network should be the top priority.

•        Role Based Access Control

Hospital networks that support BYOD should be able to segment users based on who they are and the type of device they are using. RBAC allows the user to assign a role to the device on use depending on how it is authenticated. Once the device role has been defined, access control rules can apply thereafter. Users can be segmented into groups to allow their access based on their role. This simply means that patients should not have access to same features physicians have access to such as patient records.

•      Unified performance management

With all devices using a hospital wireless network, it is difficult to make sure the bandwidth is optimized so that important things such as EMR are given priority above other things such as YouTube and Netflix which are mostly used by patients. Unified performance management has been seen to ease burden for hospital IT staff as it combines application acceleration, bandwidth management and WAN optimization into a single network for centralized management. Unified performance management also makes sure all applications are running efficiently.

•        Network access control

Network access control ensures that there is secure method for registering all devices not owned by a hospital. It also controls the user role and enforces policies.