BlackBerry & Clinical Collaboration: Can RIM Win in Healthcare?
September 16, 2010
For the last three months Research in Motion, along with their key healthcare oriented ISV’s AirStrip, Amcom, Globestar, Voalté, and Wallace Wireless has been taking their Clinical Collaboration Summit on the road. With their new OS6 and host of new enhancements to their platform, RIM wants hospital customers to think beyond the device.
With so much smartphone attention shifting to Apple’s device centric IOS for the iPhone and iPad, and Google’s ever increasing Android ecosystem, RIM wants customers to not see them as just a smartphone manufacturer or mobile email delivery mechanism, rather as a robust, secure, integration-friendly, and extensible platform for mobility throughout the healthcare enterprise. Strategically this makes sense: 1) focus on a core user community who already understands the value of unified, secure, and controlled delivery system 2) leverage the plumbing that’s often already in place and do more with it 3) let the rest of the world fight over disposable applications.
Consumerism is Creeping into the Healthcare Market
As interesting as the sessions were, the verdict is still out on whether RIM can keep Apple, Google, Microsoft and HP at bay, even in a niche like healthcare where they already have a beach head with core messaging. RIM has always delivered great solutions (and good devices, albeit bland at times), but the consumer market has been tough for them. And consumerism has indeed taken a hold in hospitals. RIM is challenged to be both Control and Kaos at the same time because like it or not Physicians and Nurses (and IT people too) are consumers.
As marketers around world know, sex sells (even if it will sometimes kill you). But it’s a slippery slope. On one hand the devices that Apple and Google’s hardware partners are delivering are innovative, compelling, and sexy; yet RIM’s competitors are challenged to build the enterprise management and security that RIM has carefully baked for many years.
I caught up with tour in Boston. I walked away with the following questions swimming in my head…
- With increasing encroachment of iPhones and iPads into the enterprise, given a choice, will clinical users go for the IOS device or Blackberry (even if it has a capacitive touchscreen)? A CIO in the audience (toting an iPad) spoke of their dual prong strategy of delivering voice and messaging on Blackberrys, but applications and reference on IOS devices (Note: the key there is that they are making the employees responsible for the device. It breaks; you lose it, your responsibility).
- There is still a great deal of fuzziness of the role of middleware for enabling integration to clinical application (both legacy and contemporary). While there are clearly difference between what Amcom and Wallace Wireless (not to leave out Globestar who was absent in Boston), this remains very hard to understand stuff for those responsible for acquiring solutions. All made even fuzzier when you bring Blackberry into the mix with its own middleware layers. Can RIM project a clear unified delivery vision, yet leverage the strengths of their ISV partners? And can it be delivered at a doable price point?
- Traditionally Blackberry development resources were hard to find. While the RIM staff at the event were quick to point out that customers like UPMC Mercy are able to deliver heavy weight Blackberry driven solutions without Blackberry specific development of their own, mobile application enablement is not plug and play for ISVs. Can RIM get and keep the attention of developers, and can they overcome the lack of application development talent comfortable with their framework? RIM needs to prove that its platform is not only powerful from a development perspective, but also that it’s easier than we are accustomed to.
- Will the carriers and big iron PBX manufacturers be an impediment to the practicality and affordability of the Blackberry Mobile Voice System (MVS)–RIM’s fixed mobile convergence play. Clearly RIM sees the great potential in delivering a seamless communication experience for mobile workers, but what will the TCO be (including all sides of the solution)? There is also the issue of their solution being IP-PBX only. In my experience here in the Northeast, there is a significant portion of the market with substantial investments in legacy TDM technology (MVS with WiFi won’t work for these folks).
- Dropped voice calls are annoying but something we’ve all come to tolerate. Unreliable transmissions of time sensitive critical alarms and worfklow communications are not. How will RIM deal with the fundamental challenges or delivery of their solutions in Healthcare, both from wireless perspective, but also from a basic operational standpoint? In spite of increasingly improved WLANs, hospitals are an RF (and operations) jungle. Indeed the wireless networks are there, but the dirty little secret is that nearly everyone trying to deliver converged solutions via WiFi is having more trouble than they want to admit.
For RIM much is at stake. If I took anything away for the summit, they are clearly willing to do what’s necessary to stimulate the interest and efforts of their hospital customers. They have put considerable effort into bolstering the efforts of initiatives at UPMC Mercy, MD Anderson and elsewhere, and they are ready to do more. As Roger Tobias (who leads their healthcare efforts) noted they are more than willing to put their own resources on the ground to kick start hospital projects.
What’s your take on RIM in healthcare?
September 17th, 2010 at 8:24 am
Ubiquitous communications, Fixed Mobile Convergence, and visually impresive (sexy) Apps are all interesting if not compelling buzz words – but, as indicated in your next to last paragraph, when either the conversation between clinicians, or text messages (alarms) are life critical best effort delivery is simply not good enough. For all the wireless vendors, and especially smart phones, the old wired phone requirement of 5 nines availability and/or connection reliability needs to come back to forefront of their thinking.