How HCA Healthcare’s Mobility Center of Excellence Seeks to Transform Care Experience

Mobile technology is outpacing just about every other area of information technology. That’s why HCA Healthcare’s Information Technology and Services (IT&S) department has created a Mobility Center of Excellence (COE) to better serve our physicians, nurses and most importantly, our patients. The Center of Excellence will assist IT&S development teams with determining build versus buy decisions and advising on best practices for functionality, presentation and information protection.

Our Vision for Physicians

We know mobile devices are in the hands of just about every physician. We are giving them the tools to spend less time on technology and more time devoted to what they do best – caring for our patients.    We are working to simplify and make mobile technology more efficient for our physicians with easy downloads and frequent enhancements, for example. Through our Center of Excellence, we are committed to shaping our development efforts and their overall mobile experience.

Our ultimate goal is to allow doctors the freedom to go to a patients’ bedside to do what they are passionate about. We want them to have the data they need and optimize their workflow so they can spend less time looking it up.

Our Vision for Nurses

We also want to use mobile to transform the experience of our dedicated nurses. We’re starting with efforts such as barcode scanning and new technology for manual workflows, but this is only the beginning of what we want to do for our 70,000 HCA Healthcare-affiliated nurses. We are working to give them the best resources to provide the care they are so committed to delivering.

Our Vision for Patients

We also want technology to transform the experience of our patients. At the direction of our hospital divisions and facility experts, we’re diving into wayfinding solutions and moving on a patient portal called MyHealthOne, too. In these areas, we plan to do the development internally because we know the HCA Healthcare environment and understand the solutions necessary to make our technology stronger.

The First Step…

…is to develop a strategy for enhanced workflows for our nurses and physicians – a mobile workflow where integration is seamless, logins are minimized and information can be accessed and displayed as needed to make decisions about care wherever users are located.  We will support these and other existing efforts and act as a centralized center for user experience, user design and native mobile application development.  We also will work with HCA Healthcare’s patient experience program to support a unified mobile user experience across the entire patient journey, introducing mobile technology each step of the way.

Working with Partners

Where applicable, we will create our own solution development, and work closely with strategic partners such as Apple® to collaborate on existing and future mobile experiences for nurses, physicians and patients. Additionally, we’ll team with other areas in information technology, specifically those at the division-and facility-level that are exploring mobile solutions, providing guidance related to security requirements, and ultimately, working towards enterprise-wide solutions.

How Our Center of Excellence is Different

Many large companies have created a Mobility Center of Excellence. However, most do not employ internal development resources. Designers and developers are members of our Center of Excellence team, so we can build our own prototypes and full-blown solutions with close access to the right data and the right subject matter experts – our co-workers.

We will manage some applications through a vendor relationship, but we are innovating internally, too. An entrepreneurial spirit for solving complex problems and taking advantage of unparalleled, resident subject matter expertise at HCA Healthcare and within IT&S is what differentiates our Mobility Center of Excellence from others.