5 Phases of Deploying Clinical Mobility Devices in Your Hospital

Deploying shared mobile devices to nurses and clinical staff sounds straightforward until it is not. Tony Belisch is an executive sales engineer in Zebra Technologies’ healthcare group. He has seen deployments that transformed nursing workflows and ones where devices ended up in drawers. The difference comes down to five phases of successful clinical mobility deployment that hospitals either follow or skip. Brett Cooper called it “one of the better presentations I sat through in the last couple of years.” The Frontline Mobility Edge broke it down with Belisch and Lee DeHihns.

Watch the full episode for the complete discussion.

What Should Hospitals Do Before Putting a Single Device in a Nurse’s Hands?

The first two phases of Belisch’s framework happen before any clinician touches a device. Skipping them is where most failed deployments begin.

Phase 1: Solution Discovery and Design. This means bringing in end users (nurses, supply chain, transport) alongside the teams managing them (IT, informatics, security). Belisch has seen what happens when IT skips this step: “When I’ve seen IT departments just make a decision of this is the device we’re gonna use, this is the software we’re gonna use, and they just put it in the nurses’ hands and just send them off to start using it, those typically are not a good way to start.”

The discovery phase should establish a dedicated project manager and project owner. Define the scope explicitly and pull in governance stakeholders (legal, HR, IT security) early. Belisch flags scope creep as the most underestimated risk. He has watched projects stall when the IT security department steps in mid-project and says “you can’t do that on my network.” At many hospitals, IT security operates separately from mobile engineering. That disconnect forces teams to retrofit certificates and configurations after the fact.

How Should Hospitals Stage and Provision Devices?

Phase 2: Staging, Provisioning, and Enrollment. Before piloting, your MDM needs to be confirmed and tested. Belisch warns that some organizations do not realize until months later that their MDM cannot push operating system updates. That capability will eventually be required for security patches and application compatibility. This phase is also where device configurations should be built per department, not per site. A nurse does not need the same applications as someone in supply chain or transport. Details that seem minor (mute controls, display timeouts, home screen apps) directly affect clinical adoption.

The output of this phase is a “first article,” the configured device that IT and operations sign off on before it goes to pilot users. It is the configuration you think is final, though the pilot will almost certainly change it.

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How Long Should a Clinical Mobility Pilot Last and What Makes It Successful?

Phase 3: Pilot and Readiness. Belisch’s guidance is direct: “Don’t let the pilot be too big and don’t let it go too long. 30 days, 60 days is probably the longest that I would ever recommend.” A hospital pilot might involve 10 devices used by 40 to 50 nurses on a single unit.

He recommends multi-stage pilots. Start in a more controlled environment, such as the ICU, where consistent nurse-to-patient ratios enable detailed observation and feedback. Then move to a higher-intensity setting, such as the emergency department, where the same device configuration faces different workflow demands. This approach lets your team stress-test the deployment in progressively challenging scenarios before committing to a full rollout.

Network readiness is the infrastructure piece most hospitals overlook. Testing five devices on an IT bench is nothing like 300 nurses with devices in the cafeteria at lunch. Imagine every device on a floor receiving a code blue notification simultaneously. Pilot testing should stress-test the Wi-Fi network, application servers, and notification systems under realistic load conditions before deployment begins.

Success criteria should be defined before the pilot starts, not evaluated retroactively. Beyond technical metrics, Belisch includes user satisfaction as a core criterion: “Are people happy with it? Are they being able to use it for what they’re supposed to use it for, but then we’re not having them come back broken all the time?”

What Happens After the Clinical Mobility Pilot That Most Hospitals Get Wrong?

Phase 4: Deployment. Belisch advocates for phased department-by-department rollouts rather than enterprise-wide launches. “If we need to go back and make changes, I don’t want to have to go back and make changes to all 2,500 devices. I’d really rather just do the hundred that we’ve rolled out so far.”

Training is the make-or-break factor in clinical mobility deployment. Deployments that fail are “the ones where they just gave the devices to the users.” Even the basics need structured training: logging in, opening the clinical application, adjusting volume. Your help desk needs to be ready on “day negative one” because calls will start immediately. Your RMA process for broken or damaged devices needs to be in place from the start. In clinical environments, devices will break.

Phase 5: Post-Deployment Support. This is the phase most hospitals treat as optional, and it is the one Belisch says never ends. “You didn’t put all those Windows workstations out there and just walk away from those,” he tells IT managers. “This isn’t just a phone. You’re putting a device with an operating system on it, and it has to be managed.”

Belisch recommends using analytics tools (Zebra offers Visibility IQ; MDM platforms have their own) to monitor device utilization by department. If one unit has 80 deployed devices but only 15 in use, while another has 20 in constant use, you have a redistribution problem. No one will report it. The other critical practice is rounding. IT, informatics, and nursing leadership should physically visit units and ask staff how things are going. “Just because they’re not complaining, sometimes they don’t complain because they’re just so mad and they’re not using them,” Belisch says. “Everything’s just in a drawer somewhere.”

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