Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles has brought the iPhone into enterprise use, beginning with the hospital's nurses, according to a report in Forbes.
The iPhone has a few native challenges that make it unsuited to be an enterprise device. The battery is not designed to last through a full shift's worth of heavy use, changing out the battery is difficult, the operating system is not used in many other hospital systems and Apple's ordering system is not currently designed to accept purchase orders, according to the report.
However, the iPhone's usability and advanced capabilities made the hospital's leadership work around the obstacles. "They say culture eats strategy for lunch. In healthcare, we would say workflow eats technology for breakfast," said CIO Darren Dworkin in the report. "The iPhone, while a consumer device, has been the first real platform on which we could see our core vendors like Epic and an ecosystem of new vendors like Volate coming together to deliver the workflow that our nurses and doctors deserve."
The iPhones in use at Cedars-Sinai have an add-on to extend battery life, and nurses' stations have customized charging docks. The hospital has also adopted the Voalte One app to allow HIPAA-compliant communication between users, and has begun using Epic Rover to allow nurses to access patient records through the iPhone, according to the report.
The rollout began with the hospital's nurses, and has created a foundation to expand the use of the customized iPhones to physicians and add new apps and solutions as they become available.
More Articles on iPhones:
University of Iowa Health Care Transitioning From Pagers to iPhones
5 BYOD Best Practices From Jersey City Medical Center CIO Stephen Li
Manage Mobility: How to Keep Data Secure as Mobile Devices Proliferate