94 percent of doctors use smartphones for texting, email

Contributed by Debbie Howlett (Mercredi, 28 juillet 2010) | Category : Email archiving

A report recently released by Spyglass Consulting Ground found 94 percent of doctors use smartphones to communicate with co-workers, manage healthcare and control workflow. As physicians send each other emails on hospital-owned mobile devices, email archiving may become a problem for these hospitals.

The report indicates most hospitals "lack automated tools to manage ... electronic mail." Doctors are forced to manually upload data to archives and other data management solutions, which can prevent organizations from adequately complying with regulations mandating email archiving. The report states emails and other messages that should regularly go into these archives are deleted because there is no automation to ensure proper email archiving.

"[Doctors and other healthcare professionals] are forced to continually check separate data silos and manually filter and prioritize communications based upon the sender, subject and priority. Critical communications easily fall through the cracks," Spyglass reported.

The use of company-owned devices can also be problematic should an employee use them for personal messaging. The Supreme Court recently ruled employees have no expectation of privacy when using devices owned by their employer. The initial case involved a California SWAT member fired for improper use of a police-owned pager equipped with text messaging capability.