Personal Tech-Wielding Docs Challenge IT Leaders

This article appears in the June 2012 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.

Healthcare leaders are facing the challenge—and opportunity—presented by physicians and clinicians bringing ever more of their own technology with them to work.

Two years after the iPad's debut, the devices are making inroads in all aspects of society, and healthcare is no exception.

Those who are benefiting now had a virtual desktop strategy already in place. Tablets and other larger-screen devices are often able to fit into the IT picture with relatively little work.

It will take longer for vendors and healthcare IT leaders to truly leverage the native power and ease of use of these devices, and for now there may be a bit of cat-and-mouse game. Rogue innovator-clinicians are being tempted by an ever-increasing number of cloud and device apps available over the Web outside traditional IT approval, while network managers rely on increasingly clever network application monitoring tools to identify protected health information being inappropriately captured, analyzed, and transmitted by these new apps.

As the desktop morphs into a touch-powered platform, vendors are working to bring tablet implementations of their existing desktop apps to market fast enough to avoid being disrupted by newer apps built from the ground up for a touch-based experience.