The market for wireless technologies in healthcare is increasing at a phenomenal rate, from a level of $1.8 billion in 2005 to the expectation of $7 billion in 2010. Unlike other industries that adopted mobile computing devices primarily for email access, the healthcare industry took a different tack. Doctors and nurses embraced these computing devices and used their PDA features for convenient access to medical and drug references, such as ePocretes®. However, they still retained their pagers for three main reasons: coverage, cost and comfort. For many healthcare professionals, email was unnecessary-one more communication tool to worry about. Receiving email required one more device to carry, in addition to the pagers, phones and other devices carried about during their rounds.

This paper outlines the multitude of benefits that the BlackBerry solution offers to doctors, nurses, support staff and other clinical workers.