Macworld iWorld wasn't just about exhibit halls full of cute, bizarre accessories for iPads and iPhones.  There was an enterprise track called MacIT, during which I heard a fascinating talk by Justin Rummel, a senior project manager at Qivliq Commercial Group, on Thursday.

Some of Rummel's Dilbert-like anecdotes will be familiar to anyone who has worked in enterprise IT or deployed mobile devices (see this list of nearly 600 large-scale iPad deployments here).  Others highlight the type of measures that only an uber-security-conscious body with 3 million-plus employees must - and will - take.

As part of a federal green initiative, the Pentagon wanted to test the iPad as document e-reader for its executives. It brought Qivliq in, which set up several pilots of 20 to 40 iPads each last year.

Despite the fact that all of the documents would be unclassified, Rummel still had to go by the book - in this case, the Security Technical Implementation Guide, or STIG, which serves as the bible for how government PCs and devices must be configured and managed.

For instance, iTunes is wholly banned from government PCs - an obvious problem since iTunes is needed for synchronizing with and setting up new iPads. Using Rummel's personal PC seemed out of the question, since only government-owned PCs are allowed on Pentagon networks. Any personal PC detected on a Pentagon network can be whisked away by security officials, and not returned for weeks or months.

"They kind of laugh at you if you ask if you can use a personal machine," he said.

Bending, not Breaking, the Rules

To set up the new iPads, Rummel had to go onto the lawns of the Pentagon with his personal laptop and connect each iPad one by one to the iTunes store using a Mi-Fi mobile wireless hotspot. He doesn't recommend this for everyone.

"If you've got 1,000 iPads to set up, this is not an efficient approach," he said, dryly.

The Pentagon had many other restrictions. Prevent users from installing or deleting their own apps, taking pictures with the iPad camera, watching movies and TV shows and playing network games. It also asked Qivliq to move some default iPad app icons like Safari into hidden folders, and prevent users from swapping the custom Pentagon screen background for pictures of their family or kids.

Qivliq also set the iPad's login and password settings to match the Pentagon's BlackBerry smartphones. So complex passwords that had to be changed very 90 days, auto-lock of the device after 5 failed login attempts, etc.

Some of the policies the Pentagon asked for proved impossible using iOS 4 and the Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution of Good Technology, said Rummel. For instance, the Pentagon wanted Rummel to delete some of the apps built into iOS 4. Told that it was impossible, it settled for Rummel moving those icons into a different folder so that they "would be out of sight and out of mind" of the executive users.

It also unsuccessfully sought to permanently turn off the iPad's Airplane Mode.  In the first phase of the pilot, users were only able to use the Good PDF reader. That frustrated some of the beta testers.

"'You mean I can't use e-mail or surf the Web? This is a rock,' one guy told me, as he put it in his desk drawer," Rummel said.

In the second phase, the iPad's Wi-Fi was turned on. In the third phase, users were allowed secure access to their government e-mail, calendar and contacts after authenticating using a federally-mandated CAC smart card reader.

Once all of the engineering and configuration work was done, Rummel had to fill out forms attesting that he had followed the STIG procedures to a T. Documenting the work, he estimates, took 3 times as long as the actual work itself.

Even with all the painstaking configuration work and documentation, and the limited scope of the deployment, Rummel says the ROI of using the iPads should be just six months. "I guess the executives read a lot of paper," he said.

Despite the pilots' apparent success at meeting their objectives, the Pentagon hasn't pushed ahead with a full iPad deployment yet. The reason is that the STIG governing iOS devices was released as a draft in 2011 but hasn't been finalized, said Rummel.

What a difference a device makes.

Without the PlayBook, RIM is a $19 billion-a-year smartphone giant, which remains both very profitable (17% net profit margin, higher than IBM, HP, Samsung, HTC and, um, SAP) and fast-growing (its global user base today is 75 million, up 50% from 15 months ago).

With it, RIM looks like a fallen star. If RIM's fallen, can it get back up? Contrary to most, I think it can. The problems around the PlayBook 1.0 were largely tactical and self-inflicted. I agree with new CEO Thorstein Heins' strategy: focus on execution, including launching new, faster, and bigger PlayBooks and shoring up its software.

What else can RIM execute better? Seeing how as Heins is already being bombarded with unsolicited advice, here are my four Monday Morning CEO suggestions.

1) Keep the PlayBook prices low. Right from the get-go, RIM needed to undercut the iPad on price, to make up for the PlayBook's dearth of apps.  Even a temporary $100-$200 discount would've juiced the PlayBook's sales, giving it the traction to attract developers, which would've translated into apps, which would've translated into more sales, creating the virtuous cycle that iOS and Android enjoy today.

RIM belatedly cut the PlayBook's price just before Christmas. The sale is going on until February 4 (or January 28, depending on the report). You can still get a 64 GB PlayBook for $299. Amazon.com is selling the 16 GB model for $250.

This is a good move. But RIM shouldn't stop. It needs to keep aggressively pushing Playbooks into the market so by the time it reports earnings in late March, it can wow the industry with millions and millions of PlayBooks sold. I'm hoping this is RIM's plan, and that the $485 million charge it took on the PlayBook in the December was to enable this.

As RIM releases new models with more powerful chips and faster networking, it can slowly raise their price again. In the meantime, RIM needs to...

2) Focus on the OS. RIM has ridden its vaunted keyboards and ancillary applications like texting and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) so long and so high that they've become a bit of a crutch. To be accepted as first-class platform player equal to Apple and Google, RIM needs to deliver on the technical goods with the PlayBook OS.

The first step is releasing a flawless version of PlayBook OS 2.0 on schedule (the rumor is now Feb. 17). Ideally, this would include a fast, bug-free Android app player, as well as a native PlayBook OS SDK for developers.  The second step is to quietly accelerate its work on delivering BBM and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to the PlayBook. BBM has 50 million users and has driven RIM's popularity outside of the United States in the past few years. The latter BES delivers the corporate e-mail access that RIM is known for.

It's unclear where RIM is on the development of those features. What if RIM suddenly delivered near-flawless versions of these apps for the PlayBook in the next several months? I think the market would be very impressed.

The third step would be to incorporate BBM and BES into the  BlackBerry 10 (BB10) operating system. That's reportedly due for release on the BlackBerry  London smartphone this fall. London will be entering a high-end smartphone market that is far more competitive than the tablet market was a year ago. So it will need all of the differentiators it can get.

3) Focus again on enterprises. RIM took lots of steps to try to convince us that it wasn't all-work-and-no-play. It paid millions of dollars to sponsor bands like Black-Eyed Peas, U2 and John Mayer. It made sure every Hollywood party goodie bag was filled with a BlackBerry phone. Don't believe me? Check out celebrityblackberrysightings.com.

Even the name the PlayBook was an attempt to make the tablet sound fun, despite the lack of actual, you know, games.  This strategy plays against the PlayBook's built-in strengths, strengths such as security and e-mail that appeal not just to IT managers, but end users, too.  Take Cale Dansbee, an IT manager for San Diego defense contractor, Ausgar Technologies Inc. He ran a six-week pilot of the PlayBooks at his 100-employee company late last year.

"Before  I could finish it, most of my senior managers were sold and  wanted  one," he said. The PlayBooks provided "extra screen real estate" for e-mail and other tasks in a familiar interface. "It really hit the sweet  spot for them. We  were really  surprised, because managers are fairly  finicky. They like  what they  like, and are quick to judge."

Dansbee plans to roll out about 25 PlayBooks, mostly to Ausgar's managers. Did  Dansbee trial any iPads with them? "Yeah. Their reaction was that 'It's  fun  and neat, but it doesn't do what I need to do.'"

Ausgar's not alone. There are actually some companies already using PlayBooks today. The Royal Bank of Scotland. UK insurer, Aviva. Sun Life Financial.  And despite the iPad's strong sales, few companies have committed themselves yet to a single tablet platform.  Of the estimated 30  million tablets purchased last year that were used at work, only  one-sixth were actually bought by the companies themselves, according to  Strategy Analytics analyst Gina Luk. The vast majority of tablets were  purchased by the workers themselves and brought in via Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies.

Also, the global tablet market is forecast by firms like Gartner to grow to 208 million by 2014.  Translation: the tablet market remains early and up for grabs.

4) Spare no expense to woo developers. BlackBerries were so secure and beloved by IT managers because there were so few fun, time-wasting apps on them. In the Consumerized age, that's no longer a virtue, but a detriment.

There are obvious things that RIM needs to deliver. The aforementioned Android app player, for one, Support for cross-platform HTML5 and Adobe Air apps, for another.  But the long-term viability of the PlayBook and its smartphone cousins depends on RIM attracting many more native PlayBook developers than it has today.

Judging by the 4,000 or so apps available for the PlayBook today, that's a small number. There are 330,000 apps for Android Marketplace and 600,000 for Apple's App Store.

RIM has some recent high-profile developer wins. At CES, game maker EA and car maker Porsche both showed off PlayBook apps. I've heard of rumors of big-name ISVs in the enterprise space preparing PlayBook apps.  To win more than a few select ISVs, however, RIM needs to do more than talk up the average selling prices (ASPs) of BlackBerry apps, and put some cold hard cash on the table.

This could involve slashing its cut of revenue from sales via App World, or paying ISVs to port popular iPad apps to PlayBook.  Such financial incentives could still be effective if run for a limited time, or capped at a particular dollar amount. But the rules of platform economics dictate that for RIM to come from behind, it will need to take extraordinary steps to build a substantial developer ecosystem.

The dream of the Paperless Office progresses slowly. But in one front in the War Against Dead Trees, a British insurance firm hopes to make leaps and bounds by using BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.

Aviva has armed 120 of its property risk reps with the much-maligned RIM tablet and a custom-built electronic form app that it hopes will boost their productivity by threefold.

Headquartered in London, Aviva is the sixth-largest insurance company in the world, with 46,000 employees and more than $90 billion in annual revenue.

The troubles of RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet are well-documented. So why did Aviva choose the PlayBook?

“Blackberry devices, their software and a support process were already well established within this particular region of the Aviva Group,” said Paul Heybourne, senior project manager at Aviva, in an e-mail interview. “This, coupled with the security aspects of the Playbook and the ergonomics of the device, helped form the decision for it to be our tablet of choice” for this pilot.

Formicary Collaboration Group built the SOLAR app, its second for the PlayBook. Formicary built one of the first corporate apps for the PlayBook for RBS, or the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The RBS Global Banking and Markets app (watch the video here) allows professional money managers to track and read research on fixed income, commodities and currencies while on the go. Released in June 2011, the app does not yet allow clients to actually trade via the PlayBook yet, though RBS has said that is a possibility in the future.

For RBS, Formicary built the app using HTML 5 and other Web standard technology, employing four developers who worked non-stop over two months, said Alistair Milne, Formicary’s project manager for the Aviva project, via phone.

For Aviva, Formicary instead chose to use Adobe Systems's AIR platform and Flash, instead.   With RBS, “the technical demands were more around the exchange of data,” Milne said. But with Aviva, “one of the requirements was to be able to send [completed] forms back to specified e-mail addresses.”

“As a device, the PlayBook is actually very  solid and feels remarkably mature. But there were certain things missing  in version 1.0 of the PlayBook’s operating system," said Milne, that prevented them from using HTML5. Things the PlayBook v1.0 lacked include a native e-mail client as well as a true  Software Development Kit (SDK).

Aviva hopes the easy-to-use UI of its PlayBook app will boost the productivity of its field reps three-fold.

As a result, Formicary used the Adobe platform to write a custom e-mail client that enables the app to e-mail back PDF documents with embedded photos taken by the PlayBook-wielding surveyor from the property site.

Despite Apple's criticism of Flash as being crash-prone and slow on mobile devices, Milne said that hasn't been the case at all.

“It's very stable and fast.  Flash is actually more responsive than HTML 5 right now, especially the  more complex the user interface is," he said. “The only lag is when you start up the PlayBook. Once the  app is up and running, there is no lag on the PlayBook’s virtual  keyboard, either. They [Aviva] got the experience that they wanted.”

Speeding up the surveyors

Replacing pen-and-paper forms and surveys with computer or tablet-based ones has many benefits. It improves accuracy by avoiding the extra step of having to re-type data from paper into computer database. It is faster and also less expensive over the long run.

But creating the SOLAR PlayBook app was more difficult than simply listing a bunch of questions in a certain order. The way a surveyor gathers information on-site varies greatly depending on the type of property. A warehouse is different from a store is different from a large, multi-floor office building, etc.

This meant that users would often have to jump back and forth between sections of their survey. “We couldn’t force you to follow a very specific flow, had to be very flexible. Because if you’re interviewing the owner of a property and he tells you something, you need to be able to very quickly put that information in the right place,” Milne said.

In other words: Aviva wanted the app to accommodate the surveyors’ existing workstyle as much as possible, not force surveyors to conform to a restricted, possibly-arbitrary flow. This, it felt, was key to ensuring that surveyors would embrace the app, as well as to improving their productivity.

In terms of the user interface, Formicary wanted to make sure that when users were holding the PlayBook in a normal position, the “thumbs can reach all of the screen,” Milne said. Formicary also wanted to maximize the amount of structured data collected, and minimize the amount of free text that users would type in. That meant as many ‘Yes or No’ questions as possible, along with checkboxes, draggable sliders, and more.

The worst possible outcome from using this app is if a surveyor leaves his or her tablet at a site, or has it stolen, leaving the reports compromised. To minimize that risk, the reports are wiped from the PlayBook once they are sent back to Aviva’s server. In-process forms are protected by Adobe’s Air technology, which helps ensure that local files cannot be accessed.

What's the ROI?

The key performance metrics Aviva hopes the PlayBook will improve include: shortening the time for surveyors to collect data while visiting properties, speeding up the time to produce reports and reducing data errors.

The overall goal is ambitious: to enable surveyors to go from an average of 2 site visits a day to 4-6 property visits. That would essentially double or even triple their productivity.

By Aviva’s standards, this is a small first step, with total project costs reportedly around $50,000.

The pilot is still in very early stages. But early reports from the testing stage are “very encouraging,” Heybourne said. “It brings improved workload management to our advisers, faster resolution times to our customers and higher caliber reporting for our underwriters.”

“The form factor, ergonomics and robust feel of the PlayBook has been very well-received by the users,” he continued. “Our findings so far, including live trials demonstrate that the Playbook fulfills the requirements that we were looking for from this discrete pilot.”

Neal Fiske, whose job in business development for Formicary requires him to keep up with financial service customers, says that interest in the PlayBook in this sector is stronger than media reports would suggest.

“Any organization that has a predominance of BlackBerries is absolutely looking at the PlayBook,” he said. “The multi-tasking is better than iOS in most peoples’ opinions. We’ve seen the previews of version 2.0 of the PlayBook OS. If they fill in the existing gaps, and in particular, bring in a full set of APIs, that will go a long way. You don’t need something like the size of an iPad for business.”

If successful, this app “sets a precedent throughout the Aviva Group. And it becomes something of a beacon or lighthouse for the PlayBook in the enterprise,” Fiske said.

Or as Aviva's Heybourne tantalizingly puts it, “Any field force role where data collection is required could benefit from this type of device.”

If you're the type who refers to the Oxford English Dictionary during simple Scrabble games, you and I might not see eye to eye on whether or not to call an UltraBook PC a mobile device.

By old-school, formal definitions, Ultrabooks are not 'devices'. They sport Intel CPUs and run Microsoft Windows - two products and vendors that carry the banner for the PC era.

The Lenovo Yoga's flexible chassis helps it convert from UltraBook to tablet.

Also, UltraBooks have keyboards and screens that nearly match the size of traditional laptops. So does their price, at about $1,000.

But let's ignore specs - which, after all, most consumers do - in favor of user experience. By that paradigm, Ultrabooks are definitely mobile. And when Windows 8 arrives later this year, Ultrabooks will definitely act more like devices than PCs. That has huge implications for the enterprise. Here's why:

1) Windows 8 Ultrabooks will boot ultra-fast.

In this time-obsessed society, the instant-on convenience of smartphones and tablets is one of their biggest advantages over Windows laptops. For instance, for all of 2010 and part of 2011, I was forced to use a 4-year-old Dell Latitude D630 laptop running Windows XP Pro for work. Not only was the D630 an unintended homage to neo-Brutalist architecture at its ugliest, but I got to know every well how loooonnnggg it took to boot every morning.

Well, here's a home-made video showing Windows 8 booting on a D630 laptop with  a regular spinning hard drive in just 8 seconds.  By comparison, it takes my 2010 iPad 25 seconds to cold boot, and my iPhone 4 an even longer 35 seconds to boot. In other words, three to five times longer.

Here's another video, this one from Microsoft, showing a Windows 8 laptop, probably running a faster Solid-State Drive, seemingly booting in under 5 seconds.

(Even more impressive is this video of an ARM-based Samsung tablet apparently cold-booting Windows 8 almost as quickly as my iPad wakes from sleep mode. But let's not digress.)

As commentators rightly point out, many of the videos today depict stripped-down Developer Editions of Windows 8, which lack many of the start-up items and services in actual shipping copies of Windows. Also, these are presumably fresh, clean installs of Windows 8. So no apps, no spyware, no registry gunk, etc. to slow things down.

Also, in practice, most users won't be cold-booting their PCs or devices, they'll prefer to the faster wake-from-sleep-mode. That's something Windows has always been less reliable at than smartphones or tablets. It remains to be seen whether Windows 8 Ultrabook users will be able to comfortably put their machines to sleep, or whether they'll choose to go with the slower but more reliable hibernate mode instead.

Still, I'm hopeful that with the pressure iOS, Android and other mobile OSes are putting on Microsoft, the new Windows 8 will start acting a lot more like them, rather than the Blue-Screen-of-Death Windows we used to hate.

2) Ultrabooks are skinny and light, just like a tablet.

For instance, Ultrabooks come very very close to matching tablets in the skinny-as-a-rail category. My iPad is about 13 mm thin. The coming Acer Aspire S5 is a mere 15 mm thin at its thickest point, despite operating under the handicap of having a keyboard.

By length and width, Ultrabooks also start to approach tablet-esque proportions. The same goes for weight. The typical business-class laptop weighs 4-6 pounds. Most Ultrabooks tip the scales at half of that, between 2.5 to 3 pounds. That is closer to the 1.3 pound iPad.

The bottom line: unless you are tween or a petite woman who refuses to carry anything but tiny, tiny purses, you should be able to tote an Ultrabook around in your bag of choice.

The other way Ultrabooks are akin to tablets is that many of them are convertible, meaning they can be used in either keyboard mode or touch-tablet mode. See the exciting Lenovo Yoga, which is the apparently the first bendable laptop. Speaking of touch...

3) Ultrabooks will sport all of the sensors and inputs standard on devices.

Multi-touch swiping? Check. An accelerometer so you can play games by moving the laptop around in the air? Check. Siri-like speech recognition as well as Xbox Kinect-like in-air gestures? That's coming, too, says Intel.

4) Battery life will be excellent.

To be considered mobile, a device should enable a user to work for an entire business day (8 hours) without a recharge. Most Ultrabooks come very close to a true 8 hours of computing, while some top that.

Both the HP Folio 13 and the Envy 14 Spectre can do 9 hours. Expect more Ultrabooks to beat that.

5) Ultrabooks will invade businesses via Bring Your Own policies.

People talk about fancy smartphones and tablets being 'executive jewelry,' but their popularity has devalued them as status symbols. No, whenever I go to tech conferences, it's the executives who pull out the MacBook Airs who get the sidelong glances of envy. I guarantee you that most of those are personal laptops that employees had to pester their IT manager to be allowed to use.

After all, when the 'Bring Your Own...' movement was kicking into gear late last decade, IT managers were calling it Bring Your Own Computer, not Bring Your Own Device, since they figured it would be fancy laptops like the MacBook Air that employees would want to bring to work.

Well, the recession hit, and Bring Your Own Computer failed to take off. Instead, consumers instead focused their energy on bringing their iPads and Droid phones to work. But now that BYOD has blazed the trail, expect companies to be much more open to BYOC, especially if that laptop is running a version of Windows.

Also, I consider Ultrabooks to be the evolutionary descendent of Thin-and-Light class notebooks - the Homo Sapien to the Thin-and-Light's Homo Erectus (netbooks in this analogy would be an evolutionary dead end, like Neanderthals).

That means they are still consumer-class devices, meaning that for now most companies won't buy them for employees. The compromise, I believe, will be allowing personal Ultrabooks into the workplace.

No industry has adopted mobility faster than healthcare.

Doctors love their devices. 81% of physicians have smartphones. They also love their apps. 38% of them use medical apps daily. One-third use smartphones or tablets to access electronic medical records today, with another 20% expecting to start using them this year.

For instance, 200 doctors and nurses at Charite Berlin, one of Europe's largest hospitals, are piloting SAP's new Electronic Medical Record app on iPad.  The app allows medical providers to trade their clipboards for (electronic) tablets, which present them a clean dashboard that lets them drill down into data such as medical history, medications (and allergies), X-rays and vital signs. It pulls that data down from a speedy SAP Hana in-memory database.

"The future of healthcare IT is mobile. It must be able to handle very big data, must be secure, and, of course, in real time," said Martin Peuker, CIO at Charite.

(You can watch more of Peuker's comments from a panel at SAP TechEd Europe in November, or see a 3-minute video here.)

Or take Ottawa Hospital in Ontario, Canada. It has deployed 3,000 iPads to doctors, interns and pharmacists. One custom-built app gives providers a dashboard showing patients' health records; another lets doctors to order lab tests, medical images or medication, according to Network World.

Here's a nice overview of worthy mobile healthcare apps from Tab Times. Or check out publications such as iMedicalApps.com, which is written and edited by medical professionals, and MobiHealthNews, which predicts there will be 13,000 health apps aimed at consumers by this summer.

The half-empty view of the glass

At the same time, no industry appears to be deploying mobility in a more   risky fashion than healthcare. Because this potentially involves your doctor, your  nurse, your  surgeon, your health, that's scary.

Checking patient records, or Facebooking? Without enforced device management policies, it could be the latter.

First, many healthcare organizations appear to be careless about your data as a patient. According to a report last month from the Ponemon Institute, half of the 72 organizations surveyed don't do anything to protect mobile devices. Only 21% lock devices down with a password, only 23% use encryption to protect data, and only 46% have any policies governing proper use of mobile devices.

That's ironic, because I was always under the impression that healthcare organizations were very conscientious about data security due to regulations such as HIPAA.

The scarier risk is related not to your data, but to your life. "Distracted doctoring" is what the New York Times is calling the phenomenon of medical professionals using tablets or smartphones during the middle of surgery and other procedures. No, they aren't always checking patient records or vital signs, as some/many are doing things like texting, checking airfares or stock prices.  Here's the Times:

“You walk around the hospital, and what you see is not funny,” said Dr. Peter J. Papadakos, an anesthesiologist and director of critical care at the University of Rochester Medical Center in upstate New York, who added that he had seen nurses, doctors and other staff members glued to their phones, computers and iPads.  “You justify carrying devices around the hospital to do medical records,” he said. “But you can surf the Internet or do Facebook, and sometimes, for whatever reason, Facebook is more tempting.”  “My gut feeling is lives are in danger,” said Dr. Papadakos, who recently published an article on “electronic distraction” in Anesthesiology News, a journal. “We’re not educating people about the problem, and it’s getting worse.”

One study found that 55% of technicians who monitor heart bypass machines during surgery had talked on their cellphones during the surgery. A similar percentage of technicians admitted to texting during surgery.  Here's a frightening anecdote:

Scott J. Eldredge, a medical malpractice lawyer in Denver, recently represented a patient who was left partly paralyzed after surgery. The neurosurgeon was distracted during the operation, using a wireless headset to talk on his cellphone, Mr. Eldredge said.  “He was making personal calls,” Mr. Eldredge said, at least 10 of them to family and business associates, according to phone records. His client’s case was settled before a lawsuit was filed so there are no court records, like the name of the patient, doctor or hospital involved. Mr. Eldredge, citing the agreement, declined to provide further details.

And here's still-another anecdote reported by the Times earlier this week that quotes a federal report written by the CIO at Harvard Medical School, John Halamka, about medical multi-tasking that went wrong for a 56-year-old man with dementia who needed the feeding tube into his stomach removed:

Before the feeding-tube procedure, the doctors increased the patient’s dose of anticoagulation medicine to reduce his risk of stroke. After the procedure, the doctors held a meeting about the case. They decided the patient needed an echocardiogram, a heart image, to determine whether to continue the blood-thinning medication.  During the meeting, the attending doctor instructed the medical resident (a junior doctor) to order the anticoagulation treatment temporarily stopped. The resident began to enter that order into her phone using a computerized doctor order entry system. These are increasingly common systems that can be used on phones or tablets.  Before the resident could finish the order, her phone beeped with an incoming text. It was from a friend. She got lost in the text and failed to finish the order. The patient continued to get the blood thinner at the elevated dose he was getting before the feeding-tube procedure.  On the patient’s fourth day in the hospital, his heart raced and he was gulping for air. He was rushed into emergency open-heart surgery. Blood had filled the sack around the heart. He’d received too much blood thinner, but he survived.

Obviously, I'm all for medical institutions deploying mobile devices. They have huge potential in helping medical providers diagnose patients more quickly and accurately, improving the patient-provider relationship, and reducing extra paperwork - and the medical errors that are sometimes caused by them.

But I wonder if hospitals need to draft up an industry-wide set of best practices governing the use of mobile devices in hospital settings (lest the federal government steps in, and nobody wants that). So no personal apps or incoming phones and texts inside certain locations of a hospital, or during shift hours. Or even the outright blacklisting of non-work web sites, apps and data from these devices.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) might seem to be a non-starter in the healthcare industry, but I don't think that's necessarily true. All of the above policies can be enforced using Mobile Device Management (MDM) software. Just make sure to choose an MDM software that offers very fine-tuned and granular control over your devices, says Tom Maxwell, COO of Homecare Homebase LLC, a Dallas, Texas provider of software for the home health industry.

Homecare's self-named app runs on Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It is used by nurses that go and make house call visits to check on elderly or otherwise immobile patients.

Rather than relying on Android to secure its patient data, Homecare built its app to have its own password, its own authentication scheme for users trying to download data from the server, and its own 1024-bit encryption for data that is stored on the tablet, said Maxwell.

The Homecare app also synchronizes wirelessly with the server throughout the day so that all patient data downloaded from the server along with the data typed in by the nurse during a visit is sent back to the server or simply deleted from the tablet after the visit is done.

Such policies can be enforced by MDM software, true. But it would be great if other healthcare app vendors emulate Homecare and make such security and compliance features standard.