How iPads Are Used in Healthcare

By enabling mobile clinical workflows, iPads in healthcare have become crucial to improving the quality and efficiency of patient care. iPhones and iPads enable collaboration, communication, and improve staff engagement with patients. However, the technologies behind these benefits can introduce risks and compliance issues if not implemented, governed, and maintained properly.

This guide explains how iPads and other mobile devices are enhancing healthcare, and steps you can take to help secure them to avoid privacy, compliance, and reliability problems down the track.

Common healthcare use cases for iPads

iPads, tablets, and other mobile devices greatly improve workflow efficiency and patient engagement in a number of ways:

• Remote collaboration on medical records by staff, with HIPAA-compliant data protection
• Secure, real-time communication via text, audio, or video for both internal communication, remote consultations, and telehealth
• Visitor information, such as videos, maps, and directories
• Patient education, intake, and consent

These use cases require that devices be readily available and the resources on them immediately accessible, when in the hands of both staff and patients.

Security challenges of iPads in clinical environments

The public nature of clinical environments and the accessibility of mobile devices such as iPads when used in healthcare present significant security challenges. The common assumptions that can be made about office devices (single users who are responsible for their devices) do not apply in healthcare where devices are often shared between multiple users performing different roles, and may move between locations or tasks.

Mobile devices are also more prone to being misplaced or stolen. The data on them is also more likely to be protected by strict privacy laws like HIPAA, meaning that an improperly protected or compromised iPad presents both an operational and compliance risk.

Additional HIPAA and other legal compliance concerns

HIPAA covers any organization that handles personal health information (PHI), with severe legal and reputational ramifications if sufficient measures are not taken to protect it. Preventing HIPAA violations is critical to the ongoing operation of healthcare organizations in the US, and other regions have similar regulations with their own privacy and data protection requirements.

You are responsible for ensuring your implementation covers the regulations that apply to your organization, staff, and patrons – no single guide can cover all the steps, and you should consult with the original text of the laws and industry standards you must meet, and collaborate with technical experts who can ensure that they are properly met.

Balancing iPad security and compliance with clinical usability

IT governance aligns technical planning and implementation with business goals. In healthcare, IT governance must also align with healthcare outcomes. Security controls and compliance measures must be implemented without adding friction to critical medical workflows or causing inefficiency in administrative tasks that could cascade to other areas or lead to preventable mistakes.

Internal IT teams and managed service providers (MSPs) that manage mobile devices like iPads and iPhones in healthcare should make sure that tools and configurations are implemented that:

• Minimize login and reauthentication delays (for example, by resuming sessions)
• Prevent unauthorized access to protected data
• Enable fast device handoff between users and for different tasks
• Support offline use, or at least be able to deal with intermittent connectivity

Much of this is not limited to the configuration of mobile devices themselves, and are factors of your overall IT infrastructure. For example, Wi-Fi network coverage and reliability, as well as adaptive multifactor authentication (MFA) and conditional access, greatly affect the above.

End-user behavior should also be factored in to governance and security measures. Inconvenient or overly restrictive controls can cause delays, and may also lead to users not adopting secure practices, or worse, seeking workarounds like sharing account login details.

Remote device management is a requirement for shared and kiosk iPads

Shared devices should have remote oversight to prevent misuse, to track their location, and enforce security policies like encryption and access controls. It should also be possible to remotely lock down lost devices until they are found, or wipe and permanently disable them if they are stolen. HIPAA-compliant mobile device management (MDM) is ideal for this, and can also be used for additional remote management tasks like deploying apps.

Devices intended for public use (i.e., by patients and visitors) should have additional restrictions placed on them. “Kiosk mode” is the common term for locking devices to a single app (or subset of apps), and preventing access to system features like settings. On iPads, this feature is known as Guided Access or Single App Mode. These restricted modes are also useful for making sure devices are only used for their intended purpose by staff in task-specific setups.

Treating healthcare iPads as critical infrastructure

Healthcare staff increasingly rely on mobile devices, including iPads and iPhones, to complete their mission-critical tasks. Poor performance, security, or failure of these devices doesn’t lead to bad business outcomes as it does for most organizations – in healthcare scenarios, real people’s health or comfort can be affected. Devices may also be integrated with, or connected to, specialized medical equipment that relies on them to operate.

Mobile devices in healthcare should thus be treated as critical infrastructure to ensure fast, reliable outcomes. This is predicated on their continual availability, security, and being fit-for-purpose.

To this end, IT teams should choose tools that allow them to automate common maintenance and security tasks, remotely monitor devices for issues for proactive attention, and provide convenient helpdesk channels for staff to report issues. Regular patching (a security necessity) should be handled carefully to ensure that the tools do not introduce compatibility issues or that their installation doesn’t occur while devices are in active use.

Effective governance and assigning clear ownership for each device by on-the-ground staff is key to the success of these processes: devices must be predictably located so they are not lost, be found at a moment’s notice, and be in an operable condition with connectivity.

Operational and lifecycle considerations for shared mobile devices

Outdated devices present a security vulnerability as they no longer receive patches to known cybersecurity vulnerabilities. They may also not support updated standards, holding you back from running the latest healthcare or productivity software.

Lifecycle planning is key to ensuring obsolete devices are removed from usage and safely disposed of. Deployments should leverage technologies such as zero-touch deployment and MDM to ensure each device is properly configured with consistent, secure default configurations. Asset management tools allow you to account for all devices in your organization.

iPad Device health should be monitored, with staff encouraged to report issues and broken devices. When a device needs to be retired, it should be securely wiped to prevent data on it being later read by unauthorized parties. Zero-touch provisioning that enrolls devices in MDM allows new and replacement devices to be ready for users to resume work minutes after they are unboxed by end-users.

These measures prevent old devices from falling through the cracks and accumulating risk.

A unified solution to securing iPads and mobile devices, and meeting compliance goals at scale

The rapid and widespread adoption of iPads in healthcare has opened opportunities for workflow optimization and better patient care, and even enables new ways to serve and treat patients. However, they introduce new risks if not properly governed and secured, and add additional compliance overheads.

Centralized management using MDM goes a long way towards addressing these risks and concerns, however tech teams and MSPs need more than just device management. NinjaOne is a unified IT management, monitoring, and automation platform that provides a HIPAA-compliant foundation that includes MDM, remote management and monitoring (RMM), backup, remote control, helpdesk, and documentation – with automation features that streamline the management of any kind of device.