Speaking to vendors, carriers, handset manufacturers and end-users on a daily basis, one of the questions that comes up most frequently is "Tell me Philippe, what's the industry in which you see the greatest opportunities for enterprise mobility? What do you think about healthcare?" I love that question.  I equate it to when someone asks me about how to do business in Europe...assuming that the mentality and perspectives in one European country will be the same in another. Having been born and spent much time in that continent, it's pretty safe to say that there is little homogeneity in Europe. The same applies to healthcare. 

The reality--and the challenge--is that there are many different kinds of "healthcare" organizations. You have skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), rehab centers, homecare providers, physician offices (both affiliated and unaffiliated to a hospital), independent lab services, and of course, hospitals--never mind the healthcare administrators. While they all share (hopefully) a common goal of providing care to those who are not well, they all serve different purposes within the medical "value chain." These groups have different objectives, challenges and may even serve different client bases (e.g. Medicare, Medicaid or health insurance providers). This has only been compounded by the specialization of both medical practices and ancillary services in the ecosystem.

This specialization translates into the specific tasks and needs of these different constituents. Administrators in the healthcare industry are going to be very similar to administrators in other industries. They are primarily going to want or need PIM functionality for accessing email, contacts and calendar functionality. These needs are obviously very different from that of a home care provider who is going to need the equivalent of a CRM and Field Service solution - they are going to need access to a day's agenda (whom they are going to visit), a tool to access the patient's record/medical history, as well as a tool to quickly and effectively enter their notes once they have completed their visit. This alone has huge benefits because it not only reduces the amount of time the healthcare professional needs to spend after work hours writing up notes, but also streamlines the billing processes such that home care company gets reimbursed by the insurance provider that much more quickly. This goes beyond CRM, field service, or transaction processing to true business process enablement and/or automation.

Speaking of automation, we haven't yet talked about medical monitoring solutions. There's an increasing array of devices that are able to relay patient data back to a central source and/or a healthcare provider in real-time via M2M. M2M solutions that leverage RFID or other location-based technologies (such as GPS) are also becoming increasingly prevalent for inventory and asset management. Can't find that crash cart? Look it up on the computer. M2M is one of the most exciting areas in enterprise mobility, particularly because of the impact it can have in improving the entire gamut of patient care.

Now much of what we've been discussing here has been related to mobile solutions...we haven't yet touched upon Wi-Fi enabled solutions. Voice over Wi-Fi and mobile workstations to access electronic medical records also provide great benefits to a medical facility. These wireless networks can also be integrated into the other location based solutions that were discussed above.

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