Over the past 5 years, HCA Healthcare has deployed over 75,000 iPhones across 140 facilities. This caliber of large-scale technology deployment is a massive undertaking, and many health systems aren’t sure where to begin. This is why we collaborated with clinical and technical leadership at HCA Healthcare to present a webinar of their lessons learned. In case you missed the webinar, which you can view on demand, here’s a recap of the process and recommendations that Chief Nursing Informatics Officer and Vice President Annabaker Garber and Director, ITG Shared Services and Nursing Technologies Heather Johnson had to offer.

At the start of their enterprise deployment journey, HCA Healthcare was looking for a tool that would expedite care coordination, streamline workflows and act as a foundational mobile platform that could scale across 180+ facilities and leverage their investments in other systems. HCA partnered with Mobile Heartbeat to develop and hone a repeatable deployment strategy for our unified communication and collaboration platform, MH-CURE.

There were several considerations to make before getting started:

  • What is the optimal pace of rollout to maximize benefit?
  • How can we make the process highly repeatable?
  • How many devices will we need per bed?
  • What integration opportunities are available?
  • What kind of formal governance is necessary?
  • Who are the key stakeholders at the facility, division and enterprise levels?

Dr. Garber and Heather collaborated closely with Mobile Heartbeat team to answer these questions and outline a step-by-step process for Phase 1 of deployment, which included going live across 11 facilities.

 

Once Phase 1 was complete, the HCA Healthcare team reviewed their processes for improvement opportunities, including:

  • Data collection efforts
  • Common workflow optimization trends
  • Integration opportunities with third-party vendors
  • Crisis response and management strategies
  • User training and adoption
  • Mobile device management and tracking

Their deployment processes continued to improve with these regular reflections and enhancements, to the point where they can now confidently and successfully deploy smartphone technology across 50 facilities in a single year. As of this webinar, there are 153,000 unique HCA Healthcare colleagues across 140 facilities that leverage MH-CURE on smartphone devices.

For more specific information about this process, or to learn more about HCA Healthcare’s recommendations and best practices, watch our webinar.