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Mobile Apps Hot Topic for Technology-Minded Hospitalists

“When it first shows up, there’s a lot of hype, there’s a lot of hope for the technology, and you [drill] down, and eventually you find what’s real,” he says. “We are looking for what are the things that we hope mobile apps can really do.”

Hospitalist Lisa Bonwell, MD, of Colorado Health Medical Group in Colorado Springs, sees discharge as one useful time to work with patients via applications. She believes many patients would find electronic instructions delivered through their smartphone or tablet more useful than the deluge of paperwork many now receive.

“When I discharge a patient from our system, they get a stack of papers,” she says. “I was recently a patient in the ER. I looked at that [stack of paperwork] and said, ‘There is nothing useful here. This is ridiculous.’

“I mean, it’s all this medical, legal stuff [patients] have to have, so I think that really turns off people. This would be much more usable to them.”

Richard Quinn is a freelance writer in New Jersey.

Make It Official

Hospitalists work at the leading edge of technology in the inpatient setting, so taking charge makes sense, says Kendall Rogers, MD, CPE, FACP, SFHM, chief of the division of hospital medicine at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque and chair of SHM’s Information Technology (IT) Committee.

Board certification for clinical informatics is one way to formalize that leadership role. Board certification in medical informatics was created in 2013, utilizing an exam crafted by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS).

Dr. Rogers says that hospitalists, more than any other specialists, are involved in informatics. So SHM’s IT Committee is urging those who would likely qualify to take the exam. “There is no hospitalist group out there that doesn’t have someone that everyone else in their group looks to to try to start fixing issues with IT,” he says. “Our goal is if we’re going to be put in that role, we need members who are going to be educated in that, who are going to be effective in those roles.

“[Certification] is just the most obvious avenue for us to achieve that goal. No. 1, it directs the information and the skills that we think that people need to have to be effective in those roles and, No. 2, it gives external validity.” —RQ

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