94% of physicians believe mHealth is improving patient safety, outcomes

The significant majority of physicians (94 percent) and hospital leaders (90 percent) believe mobile technology improves patient safety and outcomes, according to a survey conducted by Black Book.

The survey included responses from 770 hospital-based users and 1,279 individuals in physician practices. Researchers aimed to provide an overview of cybersecurity and secure communications.

Additional findings included:

• 63 percent of respondents reported challenges with general mobile adoption strategies and enterprise technology execution.
• 85 percent of hospitals and 83 percent of physician practices are engaged with secure communication platforms between care teams, patients and families.
• 96 percent of hospitals are budgeting or investing in comprehensive communication platforms.
• 30 percent of respondents reported receiving texts that contained individually identifiable information such as patient birthdays, initials or names from unsecured sources about once a day.
• 98 percent of hospitals and 77 percent of physician practices reported using intrusion detection systems and secure emailing.

“When relying on cloud services and third-party servers to manage and route messages, end-to-end encryption that reflect HIPAA’s privacy and security requirements exchanging health data are safeguarding against breaches,” said Doug Brown, president of Black Book Market Research. “Stakeholders across the healthcare industry are in the quest of finding solutions to use comprehensive real-time data and connectivity cleverly to advance patient safety, productivity and profitability. Organizations are adopting secure text messaging platforms because texts are convenient, as well.”