With some three-quarters of the nation’s health systems now having an mHealth communications strategy, CIOs are now setting their sights on integrating those platforms with clinical decision support tools, including the EHR.

That’s the biggest take-away from a survey of almost 50 CIOs conducted by mobile communications vendor Spok. The survey, taken in June among members of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), finds that most executives have a road map in place for their mHealth plans, and they’re now headed toward what might be considered the second phase.

According to the survey, almost 80 percent of CIOs see secure communication among care team members as the driving force for a mobile health platform, while 60 percent are using the technology to push alerts from clinical systems and critical test results.

And that’s what’s driving the next phase of mHealth integration.

According to the survey, when asked about their progress over the next three years in implementing a mobile strategy, just 30 percent said they now have a system in place for sending critical diagnostic test results and clinical decision support alerts – yet those numbers jump in three years to 65 percent and 61 percent, respectively.

Likewise, while only 20 percent now use mHealth to push care team assignments, some 61 percent expect to have that ability in three years. And while 52 percent now use mHealth tools to boost clinical documentation, 71 percent will be doing that by 2020, and the percentage of CIOs using mHealth for medication administration will rise from 59 percent to 70 percent.

The statistics indicate that health system executives, for the most part, now have a mobile health platform in place for communicating with their doctors and nurses, and they want to expand that platform to incorporate other tasks. This falls in line with a market moving toward a smartphone or mobile communication device that fills a number of functions.

“The strategies are evolving,” says Gregg Malkary, managing director of the Spyglass Consulting Group, which has been charting mHealth and telehealth adoption in healthcare. “Hospitals and health systems are finding that you can do a lot more on a platform with a common workflow engine that just communication. Care coordination means a lot more these days.”

“While initial deployments are often limited to support clinical messaging between nurses and their support staff within targeted medical departments, many organizations quickly expand the scope and usage models to include all hospital workers and workflows across medical departments, standalone hospitals and ambulatory environments and clinics,” Malkary said in a press release accompanying a 2016 study on mHealth platform adoption.

This isn’t a new challenge. Just four years ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers noted that mHealth adoption was lagging far behind enthusiasm for the technology because of an inability to integrate devices, apps and EHR software in the hospital setting. At the same time, an eClinicalWorks survey of some 650 physicians found that more than 90 percent believe mHealth will work if those devices and apps can synch seamlessly with the EHR.

“Physicians, for the time being, see mobile technology as a way of helping meet their concerns about modern practice,” a 2014 survey from the MedData Group reports.  “That is not to suggest that doctors are unconcerned about increasing the quality of care or satisfying patients.  They are.  But they are not yet convinced that mHealth technology is, in most cases, ready to help them achieve these ends, or that patients are crying out such technology.  Notwithstanding their reputation in some quarters as change-resistant technophobes, the data indicate that they’re open to new tools that improve their work lives.”

More recently, healthcare providers have found that an integrated mHealth platform can make a difference. A study published earlier this year in the Annals of Emergency Medicine found that Emergency Department physicians with smartphones synched with push notifications could cut almost a half-hour off of ED discharge times.

“Our study demonstrated reduced time to discharge decision for chest pain patients by pushing troponin results to smartphones,” said lead researcher Aikta Verma, MD, MHSc, of the University of Toronto. “There are many other results that could also be pushed: other critical lab results, radiology reports, vital signs, etc. For now, we recommend the use of the push-alert notification system to improve flow through the emergency department for chest pain patients.”

This synchs with the CIOs’ investment plans.

According to the Spok survey, 71 percent of the CIOs are basing their communications-related investment on technology that allows them to integrate with the EHR, while another 69 percent will put money into devices that can integrate with other clinical support systems. Another 62 percent will focus their investments on technologies that are easy to use, and 57 percent will be focusing on devices that meet clinician needs.

And that, in turn, plays into what these executives see as challenges to future growth.

Some 62 percent of those surveyed see physician adoption and buy-in as a top priority in the next 18 months, while 38 percent expect to focus on optimizing EHR integration with other hospital systems. This indicates they’re more concerned with getting their staff to embrace mHealth than with adopting the technology.

In a separate question, 54 percent of CIOs said physician adoption and buy-in would be the toughest challenge in moving forward with a secure texting platform, while 48 percent see funding as a big issue. Roughly 80 percent of those surveyed expect to include physicians in the planning process, either by a committee or through the development of internal champions, and almost 70 percent said they’ll base the success of that platform on physician adoption rates and increased user satisfaction.

And that’s not to say that everyone is in on the mHealth bandwagon. Spok’s survey also noted that 26 percent of the CIOs have not developed a mobile care team strategy.