In 2016, 82 percent of healthcare organizations had a fully implemented mobile strategy, according to a Red Hat survey, commissioned with Vanson Bourne.
The survey includes responses from 200 IT leaders in public healthcare, private healthcare, life sciences and pharmaceutical organizations, including organizations in the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Here's what you need to know about responses from IT leaders in the United States:
1. Most mobile apps were targeted toward physicians (59 percent), followed by patients/members (55 percent) and technicians (44 percent).
2. The primary drivers of mobile app development are business/internal demand for productivity (63 percent), healthcare provider demand for patient engagement (60 percent) and external/member/patient demand for mobile apps (56 percent).
3. Over the next year, these drivers are expected to shift; external/member/patient demand is expected to increase to 60 percent, while business/internal demand for productivity is expected to decrease to 59 percent.
4. A total of 98 percent of respondents reported security concerns, including data encryption (30 percent) and end-to-end HIPAA compliance (29 percent).
5. A total of 97 percent of respondents reported technical challenges when deploying mobile apps, including trouble with back-end integration (29 percent) and securing access to data (27 percent).
6. A total of 52 percent of respondents use Java for back-end development, followed by .Net (15 percent), other JavaScript (13 percent), Ruby on Rails (10 percent) and Node.js (9 percent).
7. IT leaders say they are looking to develop an average of 36 percent more apps over the next year; however, their budgets are only expected to increase by 15.5 percent.