The paper clipboards remained healthcare industry’s mainstay for a long time, but today, many of the hospitals have replaced them with handheld devices; thanks to ever-advancing mobile technology. Not only these handheld mobile devices have eliminated the errors borne out of paperwork but have also improved patient experience to a large extent.
Lately, iPads in healthcare have gained much popularity, of course due to their ease-of-use and the ability to simplify patient services and overall operational tasks. The role of iPads in healthcare has added tremendous value to the industry. Starting from quick patient registration, customer reception with iPad healthcare kiosk, easy form filling, accurate record-keeping, maintaining and collecting patient information, medicine/treatment prescription, patient engagement, to delivering all kinds of patient care, iPads and healthcare if play nice, can revolutionize the healthcare sector.
iPads in healthcare: different use cases
Lets’ look at all the ways in which iPads are being leveraged at hospitals and healthcare centres.
- iPad acts as a visitor management device to fill in important patient/visitor information in a quick, accurate, easy and efficient manner.
- iPads can eliminate the frustrating and labour-intensive tasks of scanning and manually entering patient data into the EMR.
- iPad usage allows caregivers to focus more on treating patients better while the rest of the operational tasks can be taken care of by the mobile devices with a click of a button.
- iPads help mitigate HIPAA violations in healthcare by removing any scope of mismanagement with patient data, which can now be captured and sent to the EMR without being lost or stolen
- iPads in hospitals can incredibly reduce registration costs by automating manual tasks, enhancing staff productivity, fastening dataflow, improving decision-making and increasing patient data security.
- Caregivers empowered with iPads are capable of covering more and more patient visits at their homes in case of emergency situations
- Accessing, organizing, sharing and editing patient details and treatment records become easier with iPad usage at hospital.
- iPads simplify and streamline communication between patients, doctors, staff and caregivers as they can easily avail data from anytime, anywhere.
However, the most crucial part in this entire scenario is to ensure that these iPads used within the hospitals are adequately managed, monitored and secured by the hospital IT admins. Without sufficient management and security, these iPads holding patient information and data can fall into the wrong hands leading to critical data breach. Similarly, lost, unattended or stolen iPads too can lead to loss or leakage of data or even worse, cyber-attacks! The best way out is to look for a robust and powerful Mobile Device Management Solution to secure iPad in healthcare.
Try Scalefusion – an MDM for iPad in healthcare that optimizes the iPad utility while driving data security and reducing data costs.
Scalefusion MDM: Now Drive Apple iPad Security in Healthcare Like Never Before!
Caregivers, doctors, nurses and hospital staff use a wide number of hospital-provided iPads, which act as a storehouse of vital hospital data and sensitive patient information. So, if any one of them gets lost, stolen or misplaced, all the confidential information is exposed to being compromised. This calls for the role of the IT admin to use a powerful and scalable MDM solution loaded with several security features, management settings and enterprise capabilities, which aim to not just secure your data and devices but also to drive employee productivity, data cost reduction and enhanced operational efficiency through better decision-making and faster time-to-market.
In this blog, we will specifically discuss the following robust security features provided by Scalefusion MDM that drive complete Apple iPad security in healthcare institutes.
Turn your hospital iPads into kiosks: Scalefusion iPad Kiosk Software allows your hospital IT admin to set the iPads into single or multi-app kiosks, remotely from the dashboard. These iPad-turned-kiosks allow the hospital staff to use the devices just for official purposes, without any scope of tampering with the device settings or data. The kiosk mode enables the IT admin to even lock the screen from the dashboard and to limit access to few work-apps only. This way, even if the devices are unattended, the data and the device settings will remain unharmed and the screen will remain locked, with limited access to limited apps.
- Mobile Application Management: Hospital IT admin can use Scalefusion MDM to seamlessly and securely purchase and distribute apps through Apple VPP and can also uninstall, revoke, reassign the app licenses driving effective app management. In this way, doctors, nurses and hospital staff would not be able to randomly download just any apps they wish for personal/entertainment purposes as the entire app management process will be managed and monitored remotely by the IT admin, which will also keep the devices and data safe from getting harmed by malicious apps, frauds and cyber-attacks.
- Device Location tracking: When iPads are used by varied people inside the hospital, there are high chances of the devices being stolen or misplaced, and the data lying inside these devices cannot afford to be compromised. Scalefusion MDM allows hospital IT admin to use GPS-based location tracking for iOS devices and IP-based location tracking for macOS devices. Location tracking of hospital iPads makes the less susceptible to data loss or leakage.
- Enhanced IT restrictions: It is obvious that when hospitals provide iPads to its executives, doctors and staffs, they are meant to be used for work purposes only and they tend to store valuable and sensitive patient ad hospital information that cannot be leaked and breached at any cost. Using Scalefusion MDM, hospital IT admins can apply certain powerful Apple iPad security settings such as remote data-wiping, auto-lock of device screen, strong password protection, remote device lock, disabling of certain device settings, hardware buttons and apps like camera, Siri, iCloud etc. and setting of some dynamic device policies, which totally enable the IT admin to set the ground of iPad usage at hospitals.
- Other security provisions: Other than these key security features, Scalefusion MDM also allows the hospital IT admin to blacklist/whitelist certain websites and app downloads and restrict unnecessary internet access by device users, and thereby protecting the devices and the data from several unknown cyber threats. On top of it, Scalefusion DeepDive enables the hospital IT admin to monitor the entire inventory of managed/supervised iPads and gain a bird’s eye view to keep a tab on all the hospital iPads, check security incidents, compliance violations, device health statuses and more. Further, the hospital IT admin can automate alerts for device inactivity, low battery and storage & other vital parameters that can hinder the performance of the device.
Read the full feature list here.
Additionally, Scalefusion supports remote bulk device enrollment using Apple DEP for hospital-owned iOS devices and offers other crucial management capabilities like Mobile Content Management, unified enterprise communications, remote device troubleshooting, IT task automation and a lot more.
