The benefits of mobile in healthcare are obvious. Physicians and nurses can avoid mistakes by knowing more about the patient when they’re asked to make a decision. Doctors can use tablets to educate patients on their conditions and treatment.  In many cases the firms start by replacing volume of paper or paper based processes with mobile apps. Let’s look at the example of RehabCare Group, a 28-year-old provider of therapeutic services based in St Louis. RehabCare is using smartphones and iPads to improve the patient care experience.  The company built a custom cloud-based app on top of SalesForece.com to create a paperless patient preadmission and screening process.

Mobile devices support an immediate information transfer. RehabCare also uses the app to capture vital information at the point of care to provide better documentation. Mobile devices are now being used for other tests such as training for physical therapists and to show a patient’s family a map of the facility.  By combining mobile, mobile device management and the cloud computing, Rehabcare has secure access to its data anytime.  It also has its medical information integrated with its CRM system to prevent customer care issues.

Ferdinand Velasco, the Chief Medical Information Officer of Texas Health Resources, also provides another example of how mobile and cloud computing are coming together to improve patient care.  Currently, Texas Health Resources offers read-only access to electronic health records. Velasco told me that once his physicians had a taste of what was possible, they clamored for more. They want to perform tasks such as e-prescribing and schedule management. Velasco also mentioned that there are several useful healthcare apps in Apple’s iTunes store today.

One obvious area of concern is securing information and personal health records on a device that could be lost or stolen. As a result we are seeing the emergence of private clouds that store records and provide a secure tunnel to information that can be accessed from a web browser on a mobile device.

For example, AT&T announced a strategic alliance with Acuo Technologies to deliver cloud-based medical imaging storage solutions to help healthcare institutions solve their increasing data storage challenges.  Baptist Health System and Henry Ford Health System are piloting the AT&T Medical Imaging and Information Management service that connects doctors to patients’ medical images, regardless of which device originally took the image, allowing them to offer faster treatment. The solution helps providers to store, access, view and share patient medical images and information inside hospital systems and outside with referring physicians and other authorized facilities over a highly secure infrastructure.

Project Blue Spruce, developed in the IBM labs, is another example of this. It allows people to simultaneously interact and update content in real-time via a web browser on computers and the Apple iPad and includes video chat. Today, researchers for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are using the IBM code to help analyze health records of patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDGene®)

Texas Health Resources uses a private cloud solution today that lets doctors review electronic health records as well as radiology scans. The benefits of this approach are that data will never be downloaded to the device, the connection to the data is secured and the device doesn’t need massive memory and processing power to view large files like EKGs.  Lopez Research expects to see more healthcare providers embrace these types of solutions as these companies look to balance the desire to digitize records with the need to secure patient data.

This was originally posted on the AT&T Networking Exchange Blog. You can find more posts from me here.

If you are a business embarking on the BYOD challenge, there are several items you should consider and several questions that you should answer before you get started.  First and foremost, you should be thinking about more than email. If you are going to go through the effort to support email, what other apps make sense for a broad cross-section of your employees? For example, expense report management and customer relationship management may be applicable to a wide range of your employees.

Second, what is your security strategy for allowing your users to access email and then other apps?  If you don’t think of a portfolio of apps you may pick a solution that is geared largely to email management instead of mobile application management. Many firms that are doing BYOD are enabling corporate access via a mobile VPN? If so, what does that experience look like? Does it feel seamless or clunky?  I’ve seen VPN implemented well and poorly.  If you decide to use VPN access, you must make the log-in appear seamless to the end user. If they have to type in lots of digits, you’re service is dead.  Also, are you offering BYOD on any platform or just on “iDevices” (e.g. iPad, iPhone, iPod).  Many firms say they do BYOD but only for certain operating systems and device models.

Third, what is your plan for accessing legacy application data on a mobile device?  Do you really think desktop virtualization on an iPad is the experience your users want?  No, what they want is an app that has been designed to work the way consumer apps do.  Employees want two clicks to data.  Employees want to swipe and pinch and in some cases navigate via voice.  These features require you to reengineer apps to work on mobile devices.

We can say we truly support BYOD when we have business processes running on employee-owned devices.

1)   Mobile isn’t an overlay network, it is the business.  In 10 years no one will talk about the mobile network, it will just be a seamless blending of connectivity.

2)   Mobile isn’t about the devices or the operating systems! It is about defining what processes benefit from portability and context.

3)    Successful services and applications will understand and adapt to contextual identity. For example,  who is the user? what device they are using? What is their location (home , office, hotel, mall?  What role the user has and if the data or service can be accessed over a specific device at a specific location?

4)    Services will be device and network agnostic but people-centric.

5)   Services, like devices,  will become portable as well. (e.g. corp voice services, collaboration services which are mobile & cloud-enabled).  Imagine arriving at your hotel and having access to all of your corp services on the desktop or TV screen.

6)    Mobile app development will continue to be a nightmare for at least 3 years.

7)    We’ll all worry and complain about privacy issues but small companies will continue to test the limits of acceptance and push the market forward.

I hope you’ll join me next week either online or on the iTunes podcast!

However, the real change is yet to come. Mobile changes voice in meaningful ways. Mobile is about understanding context such as:  Where is the user? What networks are available and what will provide the lowest cost call?  But also understanding how mobile can impact how the user interacts with your services.  Is the user moving? If so, the system should allow voice commands. If there is excessive noise, the system should auto mute or filter noise.  If the user has a range of devices, it should be easy to port your service across the devices.  Services are no longer tied to devices.  Services follow the user across devices and across locations.  Only products that pick up on the nuance of mobility will be successful.

Not sure how big the change will be? You only need to look to the customer panel that ShoreTel assembled for the event. In the Q&A section, I asked the 4 companies on stage if they planned to replace new desk phones purchase with mobile phones. Three of four companies stated they had plans to shift investments to mobile phones.  In fact, one company was in the process of buying only mobile devices for all of its field workers.  Only the CIO of the SF Giants discussed the need for wired phones as a result of crushing wireless bandwidth.  While not a statistically valid sample, it is a directional indication of another big wave of change in the market.

1. IT needs to mobilize a process or a part of a process, and not necessarily an application. Or IT could mobilize data to make it more accessible (e.g. price books)
2. If IT decides to make an application available in a mobile environment, what parts of that application should be mobile?
3. Not all apps should be mobilized.

Read the remainder of the article here.

• Make it dynamic. Tell folks what you want them to do! You have to make it dynamic and pull them in. Ms. Gross said she uses Northsocial as a cheap and easy way  to create custom Facebook tab.  You have 30 days to pull someone in. If you get them an as fan you have 30 days to engage them before you fall off of the Facebook feed. You have to ask yourself, what will you post in the next 30 days that will keep engagement alive. How do you measure your success? Sanuk measures it in engagement not growth.
• Join the Joke/Meme.  A meme is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Said another way, a is an inside joke.  After the popularity of  ”Sh** my dad says”, everyone started doing videos on this e.g. “Sh** New yorkers say” etc.  Sanuk picked up on this and dig a video “Sh** Surfers say“.  (My favorite is “Sh** Yogi’s say”) In two weeks, Sanuk had 175,000 views. The meme already existed.  Sanuk figured out how to join it.  She said its one of the fastest ways to grow engagement.  She cautioned brands to avoid conversations about themselves.  It doesn’t always have to be a joke it could be something like “Best things to do with you tax return dollars” if your brand is in finance.
• Know your brand advocates – You need to know who your brand advocates are, where they are and what they do.  One suggestions would be to create Google plus circle for brand advocates. Great point! I’m not sure many of us know who they are, although I could probably name two or three for my firm.
• Reward Interaction – She noted that Dunkin Donuts, Sharpie and Zappos all do a fan of the week. She gave an example of Sharpie who used a photo drawn by a fan with sharpie pens as its image on Facebook for the week. Zappos and Sharpie have dynamic walls.  A good challenge for us all. If anyone has ideas on for me on this, I’m all ears.
• Give the brand a face. People want to know who are you. Make the brand real by posting photos of yourself.  Add your twitter handle. She discussed ComcastCares as one of the original examples of a customer service via Twitter and giving the brand a face. She also noted that you need to dedicate time to do this correctly.  You can’t post and not check it for a week.

1)   Know your tools.  Some social media advice for businesses Rachel Gross started with is, “You can’t think I’ve got Facebook and I’ve got Twitter and I’m done.” It’s a dynamic space and the number of social networking channels are growing and changing rapidly.  She suggested reading Mashable.com to keep up on the latest social media tips.

2)   Know thyself.  Before you can do any meaningful social media marketing, you need to know who you and who you are talking to.  You have to know who you are before you can tell your customers and prospects who you are.  For example, are you the “go to” person for technical advice?  Are you an expert on this topic?  She also mentioned that a brand must define what it expects to give to its fans. In some cases, the brand could be providing entertainment in other cases it could be education or discounts. People want something from you in social.  The business must figure out what that value is.

I agree with this. Lopez Research is a mobile strategy and market research firm.  I comment on mobile because that’s what my followers expect to read about.   I stray only to comment on adjacent markets such as mobile combined with cloud or social, so the social media advice from Ms. Gross at ISSMM made perfect sense to me.

3)    Find your audience. Maybe your brand isn’t designed to engage in social media marketing on Twitter. Rather than fight issues such as legal compliance, embrace what you can do. Walk away from things that aren’t a clear win.  If Tumbler isn’t for you, don’t do Tumbler for your business. “Don’t have that social media envy, even with your competitor,” she says.  Ms. Gross shared her experiences fighting the legal battles of what could and couldn’t be said online while she was social media manager for Boost Mobile. Bottom line, if you have strict legal compliance issues, social media marketing and customer care will be a challenge.

Good point, just last week I was trying to decide if anyone would follow Lopez Research on Pintrest.  I’m sure I could create a wonderful mobile/social/cloud scrapbook but I’m probably better off with Google Plus or LinkedIN.  Any additional tips for social media for businesses are welcome.

4)   Speak their language. What is it that your fans want to talk about?  This is two-way dialogue. If you spit info it isn’t social media marketing – it’s just another form of print advertising. You can’t communicate back to an ad. One of the ISSMM summit members was from a university and asked Rachel Gross’ social media advice. She provided an example of engagement. Instead of sending the banner ad link to the main web site, she suggested sending users to the university Facebook info tab. They could then go to the wall and post a question, etc.  She noted that people want to be given information in the easiest fashion and a brand only has a few seconds to engage a prospect or fan.

My take for Social Media Week: the dialogue involved in social media for business is harder than it looks.  I want to share what I am doing and I want to engage around what I am doing.  Striking a balance in social media marketing where I’m not an ad is still a challenge.  Some areas are easier to engage on than others.  But asking your followers questions is a good way to start.

I’ll post part 2 tomorrow!

Social media marketing has matured to the point where companies are looking at a mix of quantitative ROI measures such as revenue and web site traffic but also qualitative measures such as brand awareness.  Time spent on social media marketing varies widely by companies but many are spending under 10 hours per week on these efforts.  To date, most marketers are still managing their social media efforts themselves.  While many businesses will continue to do their own posts, Lopez Research expects social media analytics to be an area where many firms will consider purchasing a managed service.

As expected, email marketing continues to be a main marketing tool for a majority of the companies interviewed.  Mobile marketing use was low amongst the respondents, which isn’t surprising given that a high percentage of companies surveyed serve the business-to-business (B2B) and business to government (B2G) groups.  A majority of the respondents, 88%, stated their primary geographic market is in North America but only 12% of the respondents considered consumers part of their target market segmentation.  In general, Lopez Research believes mobile marketing is in its infancy and will experience double-digit growth over the next two years.

A full copy of the report is available to Lopez Lantern syndicated research clients.  To become a client, please email sales@lopezresearch.com.

We also decided to perform a Web site refresh.  I’ll spare you the details but we decided to change the Web hoster for my services. Why? Well, Dreamhost is down quite a bit. As a matter of a fact, they had a critical outage on the day we discovered my spam-ridden status. The outage was so bad that my web team was locked out of my account for about a day.

Now it gets really interesting.  After I managed to sign up my new hoster, Bluehost, there is something wrong with my validation. Despite the fact that Bluehost took my money and told me my account was validated, my service wasn’t available.  Hence, phone calls had to be made from the airport and there were apologies because they forgot to deflag something.  (It was flagged originally for my security, which is good, but it should’ve been unflagged after my scanned documents were received.) After I’m “validated” (because after all, who doesn’t need alittle validation) the team moves my site.

My site is down during this timeframe, which could take up to 24 hours for the servers to change over etc. So it’s the middle of the week, I’m doing a presentation to over a 1,000 people and my site is down. Not my favorite scenario, but I pushed the team to get the Web site ported so all the people I’d meet could see the new site.  It’s laughable now but at the time I wanted to cry when my site was down.  Now the real fun begins. My email is down. Yes, my lovely Google apps email is tied to my old hoster and needs to be moved. I’ll spare you the details with one exception. My email was down for over 24 hours.

My site was down, my blog was down and all of my emails bounced. It’s the middle of proposal season and I’m at conferences meeting a bunch of people.  For a day, I had basically disappeared from the online business world.   Sure, there was Twitter and Facebook but most business prospects don’t contact you there.  Fortunately, a few people did connect with me on LinkedIn.  Many folks sent me Skype messages and text messages saying “ You’re site/email is down”.  For this, I was thankful.  It was also frightening.  I still have no idea who gave up on connecting me because I had disappeared from the Internet.  My site was up before my email and my contact form on the web also bounced.  My team at Dragon worked diligently to get my back up as fast as possible, but they can’t fix issues with hosters and Internet servers propogating your changes.

What have I learned from this experience?

1)   Never do a site relaunch or any major relaunch during the week.

2)   Run things in parallel until you are sure everything is working.

3)   Be around when the launch happens. If you’re on a plane, you can’t give people passwords etc. that are required to make things happen and you can’t call the vendors to “validate” anything.  I lost at least 6 working day hours of uptime as a result of this.

4)   Buy quality. You want to be able to call someone when things go wrong.  If I didn’t have the DragonSearch team, I’d probably still have spam and still be trying to get up and running.  Not to mention the fact, this was my SEO team acting as my IT team in my absence. Great customer service. I’ve used many of the new outsourced services – Elance, Guru.com, 99designs, yourremoteassistant etc.  Some services were successful and others were disappointing.  I’m a cloud fanatic but this reminds why its good to actually have people you can call if things go wrong.

I share this with you, not as a rant, but hopefully to be helpful. If anyone is interested in reading more about my SMB tales of joy and woe, please let me know by leaving a comment. This blog was designed for mobile industry trends but I’d be happy to share my experiences as an entrepreneur.

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Mobile Enterprise Applications: An Integral Part of the Business

My favorite line from the interview – “When you talk about enterprise computing, it is mobile.”  I’ve said this many times as well.  Mobile isn’t just an overlay. Mobile is an integral part of the business.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.