Use of Mobile Phones for Communication, Collaboration, and Information Sharing in Hospitals
February 2nd, 2010 | Published in Projects
Researchers: Leslie Liu, Jed Brubaker, Melissa Mazmanian, Scott Rudkin, and Gillian Hayes
Currently, most hospitals use numeric pagers as a means of medical personnel communication. These numeric pagers require a person to call the pager number, type in a phone number to call back, and then wait for the receiving end to call back. Using these numeric pagers require medical personnel to share landline phones, creating a health risk for medical personnel and patients alike. We are interested in understanding the experience of clinicians with new mobile devices like mobile and smart phones.
The MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas currently gives all physicians a BlackBerry instead of numeric pagers. The University of California, Irvine Medical Center will also soon deploy VoIP phones with texting capabilities to certain medical personnel. Using both these sites, we would like to understand the different technologies that allow for more information flow than what the numeric pager allows and understand the adoption and use of these technologies in a hospital setting, especially in the realm of “quality patient care”. We must also look at the medical staff’s perception on whether they believe that these smart/mobile phones actually increase, and therefore improve, the communication, thus inherently improving patient care as well.