HIMSS12 Preview: Understanding Mobile Computing Security Challenges

Many hospitals and group practices are unprepared for the mobile device management and training challenges they’ve been hit with–or soon will be.


Provider organizations increasingly are buying tablet computers and other mobile devices for physicians. In facilities that haven’t gone mobile, physicians are buying their own tablets and pushing to use them in the I.T. ecosystem. Either way, many hospitals and group practices are unprepared for the mobile device management and training challenges they’ve been hit with--or soon will be.

When physicians start pushing to go mobile, facilities need to find a middle ground between “if we don’t own it, it’s not coming in,” and, “fine, bring it in,” says Greg Davidson, health care senior business development manager at Panasonic Corp. of America. At HIMSS12 in Las Vegas, Davidson will team with David Houlding, health care privacy and security lead architect at Intel Corp., to lay out the security challenges of going mobile and various issues that will arise. “You have to take a holistic approach; if you take one issue at a time it won’t work,” Davidson says. “You’ve got to look at the whole picture before you jump in with both feet.”

For instance, with proper security solutions and training in place, there’s not much difference between a hospital that buys tablets for its clinicians or clinicians bringing their own tablets into the hospital. Either way, the hospital will need mobile device management processes and security softeware to ensure encryption, authentication and role-based access.

In addition to walking through the issues, Davidson and Houlding will present several real-world case studies of how providers have handled clinician adoption of mobile computing. “It won’t just be a theoretical conversation,” Davidson adds.

The session, “Addressing Security Concerns for Mobile Computing Devices in Healthcare,” is scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 22, at 1 p.m.