Innovative Care in the Community provider improves care and increases number of home-care visits.

Allina is rated in the top four percent of care providers and includes 11 hospitals, four ambulatory care centres, 97 clinics, and a home-care division named one of the top for three years in a row. When they faced data communication challenges for car in the community, the group implemented a no cost evaluation of Mobility XE supported by NetMotion Wireless.

About the Deployment

More than 300 Allina home care and hospice nurses visit patient homes, carrying a range of laptops and tablets that connect over a mix of cellular networks from Verizon and Sprint in order to cover the entire geographic area. Access to Cerner RoadNotes, a point-of-care on-line documentation system for home care, allows carers to review patient medical history, update care plans, enter new diagnoses and complete EMR documentation.

Other professionals in the social care service chain also use the system.  In addition to care in the community, nurse practitioners, physicians, care managers and directors also access the system - upwards of 400 users in all. Mobility XE is the key to making the deployment work.

From 90 to Zero in Six Months

The records management application requires field devices to sync with the central database. Waiting until the end of the shift to sync from an office or home broadband had become unworkable because of data growth - synchronization sessions were taking as long as a half-hour. The solution was to sync via cellular data networks throughout the day after each patient visit, which had the added benefit of real-time records management updates for better patient care. But as Clyde Daisley, Systems Engineer, relates, "Our Cisco IPsec clients didn't work well with high-latency connections and coverage drops. Carers would try to sync, get kicked off their connection which would corrupt their database, then have to call the help desk. The support staff had to fumble through the database to try to repair it. If they couldn't they would extract a new copy from the central database and replace the corrupt one. It took the better part of a half-day to fix and repair, and the carers would lose whatever work they had done."

"One of the cellular tech guys recommended Mobility XE. We did a no cost pilot with the 25 carers who called in the most tickets; we called them our ‘frequent fliers.' Before the Mobility XE pilot we were facing 90-plus trouble tickets a month. At the end of six months, we were down to almost nothing."

Not Just About Efficiency, But Survival

Before the pilot the mobile working initiative was not fulfilling management expectations, "The mobile computing effort wasn't working," explains Clyde Daisley. "A lot of the nurses quit in frustration. The turnover rate was crazy. For the division to be viable, we had to solve the data communication issues so carers could focus on patient care. Each carer was seeing five or six patients a day and we needed to increase it to nine a day. We got there. The turning point was when we installed Mobility XE."

Maximizing Productivity, Multiple Ways

"We cover a wide area," declares Clyde Daisley. "There's only one building that the workers report to, and for some of them it would be a two hour drive. Now they start their day at home and stay in the field as much as possible." For added flexibility, "We give each user the privilege of accessing Wi-Fi if it's available, at home or if they're at a coffee shop. Our security department are OK with that since they're running over a secure VPN."

Mobile technicians in the field are available to assist the workers if needed, and the notifications capability of the Mobility XE Analytics Module helps Clyde Daisley and his team to identify and resolve potential problems before they can impact quality of care. "We get email alerts, so I can tell the technician ‘OK, your user just entered 50 million bad entries for a password and their account is locked out.'"

Catalyst for a Growing Deployment

Mobility XE has not only solved the productivity problem, but has allowed Allina to serve more patients. "We've doubled our home care staff and Mobility XE played a huge part because it fixed our biggest problem, which was remote connectivity. And since then, we have expanded this thing quite heavily. Now we have nurse practitioners, managers, directors, and medical doctors using it. As word got out, people signed up for it and now it's standard for anyone with a slower connection or latency higher than 100 milliseconds - pretty much every laptop user who requests an AirCard. We have affiliates all over the place, and we just stick Mobility XE on a client." Mobility XE is now used by workers at Allina who have the option of working from home, by clinical service workers who maintain equipment, and in the emergency medical response system.  (see Case Study below)

The Indicator That All Is Well

The Mobility XE icon in the system tray became the indicator that the entire mobile deployment is working properly. "If it's not on, then you need to talk to someone; that's the nurses' rule of thumb," states Daisley. "Our mobile users say that if the Mobility XE icon is lit, you're good."

Click Here to see how NetMotion improve care by enhancing the operation of the Emergency Response Team.

Click Here to see how NetMotion lets the Visiting Nurses Service of new York focus on delivering great patient care, not technical issues.