VA Will Allow More Mobile Devices Oct. 1

The Veterans Affairs Department expects on Oct. 1 to let clinicians in its hospitals and other employees use mobile devices, likely Apple’s iPhone among others, once they are verified as secure and that any personal information stored on them is encrypted.

VA did not disclose which devices would get the go-ahead but will focus on a “particular set of very popular devices,” said Roger Baker, VA CIO. The sole approved mobile device currently is the BlackBerry smartphone, which VA acquired for its employees.

“We will be highly confident that anything that is storing information on the device has encryption, and in all of the cases we’ll be satisfied that the authenticated user is able to view information but not download it on to the device,” he said in a monthly briefing June 30.

The predominant approach will be to allow the newly approved devices to view information through an application from inside the VA as well as from external sources. An authenticated user with one of those devices would be able to access, for example, information from VA’s VistA clinical information system but not store it on the device, similar to a thin client.