Point-of-care hardware choices vex CIOs

Certification of electronic health records ostensibly helps buyers sort out the myriad software choices. But there's no such program when it comes to selecting hardware for hospital use. Physician and nurse demands don't much help.

"If I ask clinicians what they need, they tell me they want a computer with a 50-inch high-resolution screen and unlimited battery life that fits in the palm of their hand. I don't know how to make that happen," David House, vice president and CIO at Baptist Health in Little Rock, Ark., tells Health Data Management, mostly jokingly. (And imagine if there were a cranky doctor who shared his last name.) After trying computers in patient rooms, in hallway alcoves, mounted on carts and carried in clinicians' arms, Baptist seems to have decided on thin clients for its seven Arkansas hospitals. But House is waiting for the technology to improve before investing in new servers and data infrastructure to support a facility full of thin clients.

Baptist also had to adjust its IT strategy meet the demands of about 125 doctors who wanted to view clinical information on their smartphones.

Health Data Management share similar stories from the Seton Healthcare Network in Texas, Norton Healthcare in Kentucky and the 60-bed Bates County Memorial Hospital in Butler, Mo.

For more:
- read this HDM feature [1]
- check out this CNET piece [2] about another health system's thin-client rollout

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NY medical school seeks 'Holy Grail' of mobile devices [3]
Securing data with a hard drive-less laptop [4]
Tom Pettibone: EHR implementation--are you ready for change? [5]