The main responsibility of chief information officers (CIOs) is to implement technology within their healthcare system to improve patient care while keeping data secure. A recent survey, conducted by CHIME and presented by Spok, analyzes exactly what hospital CIOs think about data security and clinical mobility.

As the sharing of the protected health information (PHI) steadily increased over the past few years, the need for secure sharing ranks number one as data breaches have become a common occurrence. The survey of over 100 healthcare CIOs outlines what they report about data security and clinical mobility in their organizations.

Findings included:

·        95 percent are concerned about data breaches.

·        26 percent are unsure about how much PHI is shared without proper security procedures.

·        30 percent believe more than 20 percent of data is shared with unsecure methods.

·        56 percent report budget constraints as the top risk to securing patient data.

·        61 percent of hospitals enforce penalties to those who don’t comply with mobile policies.

·        88 percent use encrypted email to communication in a secure way.

·        57 percent of physicians and 54 percent of nurses are dissatisfied with current communication methods outside of electronic health records.

·        41 percent do not support HIPAA-compliant secure texting but plan to in the future.

·        35 percent supply secure texting only on hospital-issued devices.

·        69 percent view mobile strategies as a key initiative to improving clinical and operational outcomes.

·        60 percent report their organizations has established process improvement teams to work on mitigating gaps in workflow.

·        63 percent report their hospital does not have a formal process of quantifying the success of mobile projects.

·        55 percent believe their organizations are somewhat or extremely successful in adopting mobile technologies for workflow improvements.

“Mobility and clinical process improvements are important to hospital leaders, and CIOs plan to make impactful changes,” concluded the report. “However, the execution remains a work in progress: Greater than 30 percent of clinical staff cannot receive messages from colleagues on mobile devices. We will be interested to see how this data shifts over time as IT leaders continue to balance data security with better access to information on mobile devices in pursuit of improved staff satisfaction and patient care delivery.”