Security and Care Team Coordination Top CIO Priority Lists in New Spok Survey Administered by CHIME

“CHIME CIO surveys are useful for CHIME Foundation member organizations looking for quality data on various HIT-related topics,” said Kevin Cleary, Vice President of CHIME Foundation and CHIME Education Foundation. Eighty-one percent of CIOs surveyed said that strengthening data security was their top business goal for the next 18 months. And when asked which workflows are top of mind to improve with better tools, 67 percent noted “care team coordination for treatment planning.”

“Treatment planning involves coordinating the right people and information to make the best decisions quickly and effectively―it is at the core of patient care,” said Hemant Goel, president of Spok, Inc. “Giving a provider enough information with context for timely decision making is key. It is an important challenge to improve care quality with reduced reimbursements as the industry moves toward payment for outcomes instead of fee-for-service.” Many delays in treatment planning occur at the points when multiple caregivers need to connect or share information, and one way to facilitate these connections is with mobile technology.

One popular intersection of these two primary goals, data security and care team coordination, is secure mobile communications. Sixty eight percent of survey respondents said that implementing secure text messaging is an active project, and 53 percent have an enterprise mobility management, or EMM, solution to further enhance patient data security on mobile devices.

CIOs also identified physician adoption as both the top measure of success and the top challenge with these technologies. “Healthcare IT leaders are looking to achieve a delicate balance between meeting regulatory requirements for security and physician expectations to provide impactful improvements with easy to use technologies,” said Dr. Andrew Mellin, chief medical officer of Spok, Inc. “Adoption of new technology requires change management to be most effective. The organizations we’ve seen with the most successful secure text messaging rollouts first identify key clinical challenges and workflow frustrations for end users and then deploy the technology alongside process improvement and change management activities to demonstrate value to the provider, care team, and patient. For example, a well-designed messaging app for healthcare can integrate with hospital technologies such as the EHR and other ancillary systems to deliver critical results in a manner that allows the physician to address the result quickly and easily. There is an opportunity to improve physician adoption by highlighting these value-add distinctions that can save time and improve patient care.”

Goel added that while there are lots of point solutions available, these single-solution technologies provide limited functionality to address bigger picture goals. “When we demonstrate our industry-leading critical communications platform, Spok Care Connect®, CIOs are immediately interested. They see an opportunity to address communications holistically from an enterprise perspective. Being able to securely connect data from systems such as nurse call, on-call schedules, and critical test results brings these leaders closer to their larger goal of improving care team coordination.”

Goel will be attending the CHIME16 Fall CIO Forum Nov. 1 to 4 in Phoenix, Arizona and introducing the keynote speaker.

For more detail about the factors CIO ranked most important for investment decisions, the drivers behind mobile app selections, and the topic they think will be most important three years from now, visit this resource page.

About Spok
Spok, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Spok Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPOK), headquartered in Springfield, Va., is proud to be the global leader in critical communications for healthcare, government, public safety, and other industries. We deliver smart, reliable solutions to help protect the health, well-being, and safety of people around the globe. Our customers send over 100 million messages each month through their Spok® solutions, and they rely on Spok for workflow improvement, secure texting, paging services, contact center optimization, and public safety response. When communications matter, Spok delivers.

Spok is a trademark of Spok Holdings, Inc. Spok Care Connect is a trademark of Spok, Inc.