Mobile Device Consolidation: Improving Clinician Productivity and Experience

Enabling the clinician experience across healthcare

In a world where end-user technology continues to rapidly scale, clinicians are expected to provide optimal patient care while attending to their administrative duties. However, juggling several devices at once becomes taxing, making it imperative for healthcare organizations to provide mobile devices powered by modern infrastructure technologies that serve as an all-in-one solution for frontline clinicians.

Innovative healthcare organizations are currently streamlining technical burdens on clinicians by consolidating mobile devices and using proven digital, communication and connection technologies. These efforts enable better patient care and reduce clinician burnout and turnover, resulting in improved clinical outcomes and decreased labor costs.

Workforce availability and costs are challenging healthcare organizations

Attracting and retaining full-time clinician talent is the single largest controllable labor cost for healthcare organizations.

Healthcare organizations are currently struggling with 15 percent to 30 percent turnover in their nursing workforce annually, and it costs upwards of $70,000 to replace a nurse. Agency and travel nurses cost two to three times more than full-time staff nurses.
Workforce shortages for all types of clinicians, especially physicians and nurses, strain health systems and make it harder to adequately staff facilities, which increases burnout.
The patient experience, clinical team morale and patient outcomes suffer when the clinician experience is poor and high turnover and burnout proliferate.
Wellness and resilience programs have little positive impact when daily workflow and application performances are poor.

Adopting best-of-breed technologies that put the clinician experience front and center can prevent costly workforce disruptions, such as clinician burnout and staff turnover.

Transforming the clinician experience leads to better clinical outcomes and decreased costs

Healthcare organizations derive several benefits by improving the clinician experience, including:

Better healthcare outcomes: Quality interactions with patients lead to better treatment and education. Decreased levels of clinician burnout have been proven to increase clinical quality measures, patient safety and overall patient outcomes.
Productivity: Easy-to-use devices and workflow congruent applications associated with EHR and other clinical systems reduce frustration and burden, boosting overall productivity.
Cost savings: Improved full-time clinical staff recruitment and retention, decreased need for agency or travel staff and consolidation of the total number of devices necessary to provide care all deliver tangible cost savings.
Patient experience: Clinicians can focus more on patient care when they can easily access the applications they need on their devices and effectively communicate with each other.

Getting started

WWT's Healthcare Advisory Team can help you reimagine your clinician experience with advisory services at any step of your digital journey. From strategy development through solution ideation and implementation, we are your partner.

WWT's Healthcare Advisory Team's step-by-step approach to meeting your clinician experience needs

Key solution components

Across our healthcare practice, WWT clinician experts have identified specific technologies that improve clinician experience, promote well-being and drive digital transformation in a simplified manner.

VoIP-enabled Smartphones (iOS or Android): Create work experiences that are connected, collaborative and productive and improve internal communications.
Optimized Wi-Fi: Securely and seamlessly access applications and data, regardless of where these tools reside, with a more flexible network operating model.
VMware Horizon: Desktop and application virtualization, provided by VMware Horizon, is vital in empowering clinicians to be productive on any device and from anywhere.
VMware Workspace ONE: VMware's Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) platform can deliver critical applications, UX capabilities, security and sustainable business continuity.
Optimized Unified Communications and Collaboration: Communication tools that work across devices, platforms and deployment models to create a simplified user experience that fosters productivity.

Outcomes and benefits

By leveraging new mobile tools and backend technologies with trusted advisory services, healthcare organizations are addressing labor costs. Sample solution impact metrics include:

Decreased nurse turnover rate/improved retention.
Decreased utilization and expense of agency and travel nurses.
Improved staff recruitment results and cycle times.
Decreased total IT expenses through device consolidation.
Improved Clinician Net Promoter Score for the organization.
Improved clinician satisfaction/engagement.
Decreased burnout/improved clinician well-being.

The link between the digitalization of clinician workplaces and improvements in experience is achieved by providing the right tools and processes to support people as they transform their workflows and overcome challenges related to the complexity of delivering healthcare. WWT's approach focuses on improving an organization's digital workplace maturity by applying a methodology that moves from vision to enablement to optimization.

However, mobile device consolidation is just one facet of bettering the clinician experience. With 53 percent of clinicians reporting some level of burnout from onerous administrative tasks, healthcare leaders should take a broader and more empathetic approach to leverage best-of-breed technologies to address systemic challenges.