The Enterprise Mobility Roundup
The Enterprise Mobility Roundup
Enterprise vs. Consumer Devices in Healthcare
Hospitals often choose sleek consumer hardware to impress stakeholders, but these devices break down under the demands of shared usage, role-based access, and InfoSec requirements.
In this episode, we highlight how our device choices can either empower or inhibit clinical teams. When nurses and physicians are given tools built for retail or personal use, they end up frustrated, overburdened, and disengaged.
Enterprise-grade tools, by contrast, bring durability, session management, and identity-driven security into clinical workflows. This shift, from aesthetics to outcomes, will determine whether hospitals can reduce burnout, streamline care delivery, and develop tech strategies that actually serve those delivering care.
Welcome to the Enterprise Mobility Roundup podcast brought to you by Bluefletch. We discuss technology topics related to Android and workforce devices and how they intersect with business and mobility.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bluefletch Enterprise Mobility Roundup podcast. I'm here with Lita Hines and we're going to be talking about why iOS is no longer good for healthcare or the clinical environment. Is that the correct framing of this? I think we had a more formal title, so this is a working title based on a presentation that we're putting together for some conferences. We're presenting it later this year. One of the things we talked about was iOS beautiful, tremendous, great operating system. Awesome for consumer devices not necessarily awesome in a lot of the enterprise type scenarios that we work with and a lot of the hospitals and organizations that are using mobility need mobile devices for us. That's the summary for this. I leave any other color points on the overall just framing of this discussion.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think we're going to talk about the key differences between what is essentially a consumer-grade device and what's an enterprise-grade device, and while consumer-grade devices are great, they're not great for applications that are not consumer in focus.
Speaker 2:So, to get us started off, I think that the first framing thing we talked about is the clinicians or healthcare workers that use mobility devices day to day. But we could start about what do they use them for? What should they be using for day?
Speaker 3:to day. But we could start about what do they use them for? What should they be using for, sure? So a lot of times, what's happening now is this is we're in a BYOD or bring your own device model where the consumer grade device is actually being brought to work by the healthcare worker. It's their personal device and there's a partition on that device where they're actually using it for their work. There are work applications on there, there's access to virtual desktops so they can do EHR charting. They're even doing things like texting in plain text on the devices provided just text platform. So if it's an Apple device, they're going to be in iMessage texting other people, which is not ideal. So they deserve something that's going to be a little more sequestered from their personal life and their personal device. So I think that's really what we're focusing on is a unified experience.
Speaker 2:So leading your background from this is we've gone from the clipboard, pen and paper, fax, trolla, fax machine type scenario to we started having workstations over the last 20 years and then in the last 10 years, we've seen a lot of iPads and iOS, most of them BWOD related. And, to your point, yeah, I'm having mdms managed like private spaces on those where we can set up um, whether it's epic, cerner, oracle, as these other apps within there, but the, I guess the actual form factor, the two form factors we're going to see, are going to be handheld or tablet as the two primary ones, and then that you, you still have the wows, the workstations on wheels that a lot of a lot of hospitals use, and I think we've talked about those in some other, some other podcasts, but those are the. That's what the technology landscape looks like right now, right, yep.
Speaker 3:That's exactly right.
Speaker 2:And I think the the the promise versus reality. I know Apple has done an incredible job with their hardware. Personally, I have some Apple phones along with Android phones. I have way too many mobile devices you can probably guess by looking behind me but the general experience Apple has put forth for the consumer has been spectacular. How you know in the world of you know, when you compare that versus Android, what are some of the key takeaways for why Apple doesn't work as well in a lot of the enterprise spaces?
Speaker 3:Sure, so I think you know, in an enterprise space, particularly in something that's very process heavy and outcome oriented like healthcare, is the degree to which you can limit variables is going to make a huge difference on unifying a process and unifying positive outcomes. Consumer devices are built for individual consumers. They're not built to be shared. They're not built to be shift based Like. Can you imagine a world where you know your personal iPhone, where at the end of the time you're at work, you just give it to someone else? You would never do that. But if you didn't have to worry about bringing your phone into the workplace but had a tool that did everything you needed it to do and then you could just leave it behind when you left, that makes a huge difference, and the consumer grade device just wasn't conceived for that purpose. So it's a little bit of a square peg round hole. The promise of accessibility on that device, I think, has been met, but then you really need to start looking at operational excellence as the next step.
Speaker 2:And I know for iOS it's pure consumer, really focused on that. It's like a single person carry device. There are also Android devices that are also considered consumer devices and I think that Pixel is probably the first one, and it is Pixel's. Primary job from Google is to go up against iOS and try to in the consumer space and try to compete against them. Do you see anybody rolling out Pixels in the enterprise space? We have compete against them. Do you see anybody rolling out pixels in the enterprise space?
Speaker 3:We have had people ask us about pixels and specifically healthcare organizations ask us if we can use pixels with our tool set. The issue is because Google owns that device. They view that as essentially the paradigm of what they want Android to look and feel like from a consumer perspective and again, they've not engineered it for the shared device situation. So a lot of what we would need to do to make it accessible to the shared device environment isn't unlocked from a Google perspective. Brett, I'm sure you could talk about specifically around device ownership and what you have permissions to do on the device that I think are going to be really limiting there.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you want to add, I think for me there are a couple of great vendors that we work with, so the ones that come to mind first are going to be the Zebra, spectralink. Honeywell have their devices that are specifically designed for healthcare. Number one like you said, they have the ability to have the management controls, security controls, and be used in a shared manner. Number two they also have coding that is specifically designed for healthcare cleaners. You can clean them with an astringent or a cleaner that's designed to be used in those environments, whereas if you cleaned a pixel or a iphone, um, after about four weeks it's probably going to lose a lot of its uh, uh outer coating or whatever. Whatever it's called the stuff they put on top of the grill glass. And then, yeah, the other option I've seen a lot of places where they'll put those inside of a case, and it just makes it. It's a lot clunkier of an experience for the folks to have to put those in their scrubs and carry around all day but yeah yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know cases. I do like those offerings from a lot of those rugged manufacturers. And yeah, I agree with the assessment on the Pixel. It is definitely not as enterprise forward as a lot of the enterprise specific companies which is nice that have capabilities and features designed for sub-domains. I know Spectralink has had a lot of telephony capabilities and features that have been very heavy in the healthcare space and is loved by a lot of folks there.
Speaker 2:I think you know one of the things you talked about, the just transitioning from iOS to Android.
Speaker 2:We've done this at a couple places of going from iPads and iPhones, which I think the thing stands out to me is a lot of customers that the amount of repair they have to do on those because they do break they don't handle the cleaners as well. I think we had one customer that was doing and this is a stat if you do device maintenance, but they were their repairs annual repair, for I think their rate was 200%. So every device they had they had to repair it twice a year, and so you can imagine a company that has 20,000 devices and is effectively fixing them or repairing them twice a year how expensive that becomes and so the cost savings they got by going with a carrier subsidized iPhone was quickly eaten into by the repair costs, management costs. But I guess, that being said, if somebody has iOS and they move to Android, what are some of the things that they have to do as part of that transition, or some of the things we've helped them with, as they've done that?
Speaker 3:Sure. So I think the initial thing is the tooling on the device itself. From a mobile app perspective, Thankfully, most of the operational apps that are out there if they're purchased off the shelf or commercially available are going to have an Android version of that application and in particularly in healthcare. There are a lot of mobile applications that maybe initially were only on iOS because they were focused on that initial mobile environment in healthcare, where there was the BYOD side of things. But Android has caught up quite a bit. So I think the biggest challenge is going to be making sure that you have comparable tooling on the device for your frontline workers is probably the biggest part of the transition, and there's a bit of a learning curve too, just because the Android operating system on the device does. The interface is a little bit different. It is also intuitive, but it's just different. So there's going to be some transition and learning curve for someone who's only used to working on iOS to pick up an Android device and automatically know where things are, but it's a very short learning curve.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think with a lot of the search navigation type functionality a lot of that's considered feature parity between those two platforms. I don't know if there's one that does it better than the other. I think they're pretty comparable platforms. I don't know if there's one that does it better than the other. I think they're pretty comparable. But there is a little bit of like oh, you got to press here, you know, do this instead of this swipe motion. So yeah, I think it's pretty simple.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing I think about, too, is the infrastructure you can get for Android. There are a lot of additional capabilities around it. So the thing that I was thinking of is things like charging cradles. I know there's charging cradles that third party that you can get for iOS devices, but there are ones that are specifically designed for Android. They have contact pads in the back so you don't have to use USB-C, and a lot of those things actually increase the life of the device, improve the charging speed or charging ability Like when you set it in there, you actually know it's charging, and I think a lot of those things. The ecosystem. Having to put that infrastructure in place is a cost and it's a transition piece, but once you have it, it definitely makes the devices a lot more operational.
Speaker 3:in our experience, yeah, I think that's a great point. It's a bit of like a retooling, but once it's there because there is an ecosystem support around it, like if you purchase a specific OAM Android device, like a Zebra or a Honeywell, for example, they're going to have charging cradles that go along with them that are made by them. It's not a third party that you have to go rely on that. One 30-party charging cradle may not be as good as another.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the other thing I like about the purpose-built devices I'm going to call them like the Android purpose-built devices versus iOS is you can get devices that have certain capabilities that, out of the box, you're not going to see in them. The one that comes to mind for me is RFID. So there are a number of devices from the rugged manufacturers that are including a built-in RFID reader and, from an experience standpoint especially with the wrist bands that we're using in a lot of hospitals now, you can just have that built in and quickly scan or tap the wrist band and get the information without having to physically scan a QR code or type something in. So there are other advantages, too in that ecosystem you're not going to get with iOS devices. Yeah, the next topic we had was around security, so I think I called it better security.
Speaker 2:By design and historically, there was a big perception of iOS being more secure than Android, and I feel like a lot of this was early on. Android was an open operating system, so there was variants that were created. People were, you know, hackers were going in and doing things to have their own versions where they could rip software and put it on there. There's also a number of I'm going to call them foreign companies that didn't necessarily have everybody's best interest in mind, that had cheap devices that were taking people's data. I guess the and I think recently we talked that a lot of people say that the Android may be more secure than iOS. Now, but what are your thoughts or key points for you around security for Android devices versus security for iOS devices?
Speaker 3:Sure, so I think you touched on. You know there is still the need to make sure you're avoiding the unknown third parties, but if you do have Android devices that are GMS certified, then you can be certain that you're going to have the security posture that you need for the most part. Also, from an MDM perspective, management controls around what you can do on an Android device and what some of the OEMs are even exposing that can be done on those devices via the MDM is much more advanced than what an iOS device is going to do. Finally, if you're trying to create a unified experience or if there are security issues from OS upgrades on the device, you can control that much more easily on an Android device than you can in the iOS ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean on that first point, just so everybody understands. So GMS is Google Managed Services, which is if majority devices, if they're in the Google ecosystem. So if they run Play Store, they have to be certified by Google and as part of that, so if they run Play Store, they have to be certified by Google and as part of that, the OEM has to include certain security features. Like they can't do things like store biometrics outside of a secure container, they can't share certain things like fingerprints. So there's innate security requirements that Google has for the manufacturers. But in addition to that, google has tools they include with GMS around their new Android Enterprise Device Trust, where it's actively looking for nefarious apps that might have been installed and containerizing those. Google's also done a really good job of protecting data. So they created a different process around shared storage above Android 9, where they restricted what can talk to what. So now everything on an Android device has to be through an intent-based communication or a MDM-granted process. So there are a lot of features that Google has added over the last 10 years to, I guess, debate or negate some of the arguments that people have around them not being secure.
Speaker 2:I think that at an enterprise level, the ability to, like Lee said, the ability to manage them and use the controls from the MDM. I think that is a lot more powerful than what you get with iOS, and iOS is a little less limited or a little more limited than that, which is, I think, why we built BlueFletch specifically around the Android ecosystem. That being said, ios does have really good use cases. Lee, when you think about the iOS, what are the key enterprise roles you see it in? Where do you see it going out in the field or being used in the field?
Speaker 3:Where it's still quite effective. You see a lot actually in air carriers, pretty commonly for your frontline workers in that field. So a frontline worker I'm defining as above the wing, meaning like a flight attendant or a pilot or even someone who's doing roving customer service on the floor in the airport, for example. You do see it a lot in those areas. Other areas I think you're still going to see it for a while is iOS does have a cachet around it from a luxury I'm using air quotes under my desk right now perspective. So I think there's going to be maybe some high-end retail that likes the perception of the premium that comes along with iOS. So I think it's not going to die out in those areas. But that's not the majority of the use cases out there, right In terms of shared devices and where they live in the ecosystem.
Speaker 2:So, in summary, if you have a mobile devices you're rolling out in the healthcare system or healthcare ecosystem, look at Android first. You can get purpose-built devices. They'll last longer, they're easier to manage. You can get purpose-built devices. They'll last longer, they're easier to manage, you have more control from an enterprise IT standpoint and the security features are all there. So definitely look at that first and if you have questions about it, we're always willing to hop on a call and field it. So reach out to us at info at bluefudgecom or ping us on LinkedIn or one of the other socials. Lee anything else. Any other closing comments or things we missed?
Speaker 3:You know, one thing we touched on very briefly and it's a whole other, probably, topic that we can get into is the ruggedization of these devices and how there is a need for device life extension in every fleet of shared devices, but particularly in health care, because health care is a rugged environment too, just like a warehouse or something like that. You touched on the relative fragility of iOS, but correspondingly, there's a rugged side of it from an Android perspective, so I think that's important to keep in mind too. Mark.
Speaker 2:MIRCHANDANI, that is a great call. I think we'll probably have to cover that in another topic. It's a good 20 minutes. We could probably rail on that one for so. Thank you everybody for joining us today and, like I said, if you have questions, feel free to reach out to us at info at bluefudgecom. Appreciate it, have a good one, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Enterprise Mobility Roundup podcast. If you enjoyed the discussion, please take a few moments to rate us. If you'd like to listen to future episodes, please subscribe. To learn more about mobility topics or submit any questions, visit us at bluefletchcom.