introducing applicable security tools,
Rege says. “What that means is there’s
a new platform for folks to look at.” MobileIron, with 3,800 clients, recently
held a Web seminar with Microsoft on Windows Phone 8 and
got 2,500 attendees, so there
is plenty of interest in the
new version, he adds. But
while MDM vendors gear
up to fully support Microsoft mobile
devices, they still have
to continue support for
a famous legacy device
now in ;nancial trouble—Blackberry—and
be prepared for large scale
migrations if parent company
Research in Motion does not survive or is
sold, he notes.
Starting out
Ownership of mobile devices being used
in health care varies. Some organizations
purchase the devices while others let clinicians, sta; and administrators bring in
their own. At Lehigh Valley Health Network, departments buy their own iPads,
but the information technology professionals handle device con;guration and
training on how to responsibly use the
devices in the facility.
Lehigh Valley is an Air Watch client. Its
suite of MDM software can be hosted over
the cloud by the vendor or on-premises
by the user. ;e delivery system hosts its
MDM on the simple premise that it didn’t
want any chance of patient data going
from its network into the cloud, technical
system analyst Jim Shellhamer says. ;at
shows just how security-conscious
some hospitals have become.
Prior to adopting a suite
of products from Air Watch,
Lehigh Valley had cobbled
together an MDM strategy
using iPad con;guration
utilities. ;ere were limits.
Once the devices were in
user hands, there was
no way to know what
other apps were
running on them,
and whether the
devices were de-
veloping security
issues.
MDM systems
enable a consistent,
;e MDM system at Lehigh Valley
Health Network was implemented in late
August 2011 as a pilot site, a process that
only took about four hours, according to
Shellhamer. And very quickly came the
;rst lesson of what happens when an orga-
nization opens itself to mobile device use.
Grow with the vendor
Group practice Preferred Health Partners
in Brooklyn learned its early lessons about
mobile device management software
along with its vendor, which was entering
the health care market. ;e practice began
with a pilot program in August 2012 and
soon became a beta site for its vendor.
;e vendor had a lot to learn and Preferred Health has gone through some trying times, acknowledges CIO Joel Taylor,
who declines to identify the company.
;e way the MDM product sorted e-mail
was confusing and tweaks were needed
to make the process more like the way a
smartphone already handles e-mail. And
