Six tips for adding wireless devices to your environment

Computerworld - Wireless portable devices -- BlackBerries, smart phones, Wi-Fi-enabled handhelds and Windows tablets -- are becoming pervasive. They, rather than desktop and laptop computers, are the most common endpoints of wireless networks.

Usually they first enter the office as the private property of employees, who then immediately want to get their office e-mail and after that a list of other information on their devices. Increasing numbers of organizations across many industries are finding ROI in these devices, whether for supporting outside sales and support personnel -- whose jobs are to be out of the office -- or to provide off-hours connectivity and information access to valuable information workers.

An extreme case is physicians in hospitals. They need mobile connectivity both in and outside the facility, at patients' bedsides and in their own bedrooms. The data they need to access -- identifiable patient information -- is regulated and sensitive, requiring high security and privacy levels. And an electronic patient record is an intensive application in terms of the demands it puts on the end-user device, combining alphanumeric information with charting, near-real-time readings from bedside devices and even medical images.

Northeast Medical Center (NEMC) in Humble, Texas, implemented a PDA application two years ago in response to requests from several of its doctors for mobile access to the latest patient information, from wherever they happen to be. Carla Maslakowski, NEMC's vice president of operations and CIO, offers the following recommendations to other organizations considering mobile, wireless access:

1. Listen to your users: "Everyone wanted information anywhere, anytime. People were asking why we don't go wireless." The wireless initiative, therefore, was a response to user demands, not something imposed on them by IT. That almost guaranteed instant acceptance.

2. Upgrade security first: "The first thing we did was to conduct a security assessment and partner with Global Data Systems to upgrade our security. They added endpoint security, intrusion-detection appliances, stronger firewalls and VPNs for point-to-point security," Maslakowski says.

3. Look for a proven product that fits your needs rather than an experiment. Gartner Inc. advises its clients to let someone else pioneer new products and discover the bugs and design issues that come with immature software. NEMC's PDA application, for example, has been in use in clinical situations for a decade and in that time has grown from a simple charge capture system to an inclusive medical record. All its features were designed to meet the needs of doctors and have been thoroughly tested by users.

4. Consider user comfort levels: NEMC's application runs on both Palm and Windows Mobile devices. However, says Maslakowski, "We standardized on Palm because it is a simpler system to use and because many of our doctors were already using Treo 650s. There is a lot of medical software for the Palm -- actually one of the issues was that our doctors didn't want to give up their Palm applications, and they didn't want to have to carry an extra device."