Nurses Using Their Own Devices Must Keep Up With Employer Policies to Ensure Sensitive Information is Safeguarded

AURORA, Colo. - The bring your own device (BYOD) movement offers great potential to help nurses access medical information or respond to patients more quickly. But these diverse personal devices also create security and HIPAA patient sensitivity issues associated with mobile technology - including security challenges associated with wireless data transmission and remote printing.

"The BYOD phenomenon represents one of the greatest challenges for IT and administrative health care professionals because it's both a technical and behavioral challenge that can impact future technological developments, says Kurt Linberg, Ph.D., provost at American Sentinel University. "If we look at health care history, new regulations tend to constrain productivity initially, but then as regulations, policy and technology improve there is more room for innovation implementation."

Because smartphones and tablets feel like miniature computers, hospital employees have come to expect the ability to print from them, Dr. Linberg says that IT and administrative professionals will be continually challenged in making technical changes and ensuring required behavior modification of very busy health care professionals.

BYOD means that potentially sensitive data will be wirelessly transmitted over the hospital network - so this data needs to be encrypted to make it unreadable by outsiders.

"If I'm a busy health care professional, I'm trying to squeeze more time out of the day and I'll be using my cell phone to quickly connect to a work portal, answer patient email and countless other things. I want to get the job done and I don't want to have a barrier to my productivity," says Linberg. "So the role of both the IT professional and the health care worker for safeguarding private and confidential patient data is critical."

He says that the newer wireless technologies that provide long-range connectivity make encryption especially crucial. Otherwise, anyone within range of a non-encrypted network could gain access to it and hackers could potentially capture patient data.

When the transmission involves sending data to a printer, the printed documents themselves also raise a security concern and may be a security hazard. As an example, Dr. Linberg notes that when employees send a file to print, they must often choose from a long list of printers. If it's not clear which printer is the correct choice or is in closest proximity to those receiving the document, the printed file may be left sitting at the printer for an extended period until it is picked up - making it vulnerable to being picked up or viewed by a person who is not authorized to access this data.

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