Mobile Technologies: Expectancy, Usage, and Acceptance of Clinical Staff and Patients at a University Medical Center

BACKGROUND: Despite their increasing popularity, little is known about how users perceive mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs in medical contexts. Available studies are often restricted to evaluating the success of specific interventions and do not adequately cover the users' basic attitudes, for example, their expectations or concerns toward using mobile devices in medical settings. OBJECTIVE: The objective of the study was to obtain a comprehensive picture, both from the perspective of the patients, as well as the doctors, regarding the use and acceptance of mobile devices within medical contexts in general well as the perceived challenges when introducing the technology. METHODS: Doctors working at Hannover Medical School (206/1151, response 17.90%), as well as patients being admitted to this facility (213/279, utilization 76.3%) were surveyed about their acceptance and use of mobile devices in medical settings. Regarding demographics, both samples were representative of the respective study population. GNU R (version 3.1.1) was used for statistical testing. Fisher's exact test, two-sided, alpha=.05 with Monte Carlo approximation, 2000 replicates, was applied to determine dependencies between two variables. RESULTS: The majority of participants already own mobile devices (doctors, 168/206, 81.6%; patients, 110/213, 51.6%). For doctors, use in a professional context does not depend on age (P=.66), professional experience (P=.80), or function (P=.34); gender was a factor (P=.009), and use was more common among male (61/135, 45.2%) than female doctors (17/67, 25%). A correlation between use of mobile devices and age (P=.001) as well as education (P=.002) was seen for patients. Minor differences regarding how mobile devices are perceived in sensitive medical contexts mostly relate to data security, patients are more critical of the devices being used for storing and processing patient data; every fifth patient opposed this, but nevertheless, 4.8% of doctors (10/206) use their devices for this purpose. Both groups voiced only minor concerns about the credibility of the provided content or the technical reliability of the devices. While 8.3% of the doctors (17/206) avoided use during patient contact because they thought patients might be unfamiliar with the devices, (25/213) 11.7% of patients expressed concerns about the technology being too complicated to be used in a health context. CONCLUSIONS: Differences in how patients and doctors perceive the use of mobile devices can be attributed to age and level of education; these factors are often mentioned as contributors of the problems with (mobile) technologies. To fully realize the potential of mobile technologies in a health care context, the needs of both the elderly as well as those who are educationally disadvantaged need to be carefully addressed in all strategies relating to mobile technology in a health context.

Ensuring Mobile Device Security and Compliance at the Workplace

End users urgently request using mobile devices at their workplace. They know these devices from their private life and appreciate functionality and usability, and want to benefit from these advantages at work as well. Limitations and restrictions would not be accepted by them. On the contrary, companies are obliged to employ substantial organizational and technical measures to ensure data security and compliance when allowing to use mobile devices at the workplace. So far, only individual arrangements have been presented addressing single issues in ensuring data security and compliance. However, companies need to follow a comprehensive set of measures addressing all relevant aspects of data security and compliance in order to play it safe. Thus, in this paper at first technical architectures for using mobile devices in enterprise IT are reviewed. Thereafter a set of compliance rules is presented and, as major contribution, technical measures are explained that enable a company to integrate mobile devices into enterprise IT while still complying with these rules comprehensively. Depending on the company context, one or more of the technical architectures have to be chosen impacting the specific technical measures for compliance as elaborated in this paper. Altogether this paper, for the first time, correlates technical architectures for using mobile devices at the workplace with technical measures to assure data security and compliance according to a comprehensive set of rules.