iOS 16 for healthcare

We all know that the healthcare industry greatly evolved during the pandemic as it demanded practitioners be more mobile and adapt to quickly changing conditions. The remote nature of these changes means technology leaders needed to innovate to meet healthcare needs.

Apple’s new iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and watchOS 9 show Apple’s continued commitment to providing healthcare workers with convenient, secure and powerful tools that help provide quality care in a still-evolving health landscape.

Apple devices for healthcare

Let’s take a look at how devices are used in a hospital. A healthcare professional may use their phone or tablet to document clinical notes, access medical records, look up reference resources or talk to other staff or patients. Healthcare is a leading industry where workers bring their own devices (BYOD), meaning much of this sensitive data and communication is on their personal devices. It’s critical to ensure that this data is being kept in the right hands.

How can we ensure medical records are being kept secure? iOS 16 offers a few features that make it easy to enroll BYOD devices into your institution’s MDM while keeping them continuously secure.

To get employee-provided devices enrolled easily, enrollment single-sign-on gives employees access to hospital resources with a single authentication. This works in tandem with your MDM as the employee logs on to compatible apps with their managed Apple ID and cloud identity provider credentials.

Once devices are enrolled into your MDM, managed device attestation ensures that only allowed devices get access to hospital resources and sensitive data by stringently verifying each device’s identity. Your device is kept up-to-date with any of your MDM policies using declarative device management by keeping each device proactively updated without putting too much load on the MDM. And Apple’s new rapid security response feature pushes any security updates to every device between software updates, ensuring they are secured without having to go through the trouble of updating the operating system.

Healthcare at home

Patient care doesn’t just happen in person at a hospital. Organizations like the Walker Scottish-Rite (WSR) clinic in Missouri continued to provide speech-language therapy for children during COVID, right in their patients’ homes. The WSR Clinic provided pre-configured iPads managed by Jamf to each of their patients, allowing them to safely and productively continue their sessions remotely.

By using managed devices, patients and organizations can rest assured that their data from these sessions are secure and that patients are only able to access what they need for their sessions—nothing more.

Healthcare’s move into our homes is accompanied by a shift of health data into our own hands. Apple focuses on 17 areas of health and fitness with iOS 16 and watchOS 9, with 150+ types of health data available in the Health app and over 800 institutions offering health records on iPhone. iOS 16 also helps simplify taking medications by allowing users to create a schedule with medication reminders. Users can easily add their medications by using their cameras.

These features assist patients with keeping track of their prescribed care regime and help them provide their health records to their healthcare practitioners.