Development, integration and operation of mobile, Android-based medical devices in hospitals: Experiences from the GlucoTab® system

The use of mobile applications is increasing in the hospitals. Besides numerous advantages such as time and location independent view of examination results, documentation of therapy at the patient site, point of care workflow and decision support, smartphone- or tablet-based mobile systems pose challenges to system manufacturers and hospital-IT operators. In this paper we present our experiences on managing mobile, Android-based medical devices in hospitals based on the GlucoTab®. GlucoTab® is a client-server system using a Google Android-based tablet as a frontend device for diabetes workflow and insulin decision support in hospitals. We analysed the hospital IT-infrastructure for mobile devices in eight different hospitals and based on recent published reports. Based on this analysis we developed suggestions on how to handle typical administrative issues like domain integration, software inventory and distribution or user management. Depending on the integration prerequisites of hospitals we finally provided five different integration scenarios for the GlucoTab® system.