RehabCare embraces Apple, cloud services as next-gen IT platforms
Two years ago, RehabCare Group in St. Louis saw the writing on the wall: The Apple iPhone would soon work with Microsoft Exchange, the company’s email platform, and nearly everyone at the company wanted one of the slick, touch screen devices.
Fighting the IT tendency to quash what some felt would surely turn into a support situation run amok, the company went to the mall and bought 15 iPhones and distributed them. “Then we sat back to see if there was the support nightmare we expected,” says Dick Escue, RehabCare’s CIO. “There wasn’t.”
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The nationwide provider of post-acute services, currently in the process of being acquired by Kindred Healthcare, discovered that Apple devices “don’t break.” Escue says the IT team learned that the iPhone was so was simple to configure that “we got no calls to the help desk. It was a big defining moment.”
Indeed: The company now runs more than 10,000 Apple iPhone, iPad and iTouch devices. It was able to provision the devices and maintain Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act (HIPAA) compliance in part because it’s using a mobile device management (MDM) platform that supported Apple’s mobile OS early on.
Startup MobileIron’s software allows remote device wipe and also virtualizes smartphones to differentiate between personal and corporate data. That could come in handy should the company wish to remove only corporate data from a blended personal/work phone.
RehabCare also uses cloud services such as Google Docs and Salesforce.com software as a service (SaaS). It also used Salesforce’s Force.com platform as a service (PaaS) to build its first mobile application: an automated patient preadmission application.
“Saleforce didn’t shy away from doing what it had to do to encrypt the data at the database layer,” for HIPAA compliance, says Escue, who described the cloud as “everything it’s supposed to be: no infrastructure build-out and pay as you go.”
Escue cites a 90% reduction in mobile device replacement tickets from 2009 to 2010, likely owing to employees “treating their device as a personal one, even if we buy it.”
Interestingly, the decision to embrace Apple wasn’t really about moving from corporate-liable to individual-liable purchasing. The company does allow employees to use their own Apple devices for work or will cheerfully supply them. But there are no Android or other mobile OSs kicking around that the company supports.
“I’m staying open-minded about Android,” Escue says cautiously. “Generally, Google is more forthcoming with information than Apple, but I don’t know how I would [give up] the benefit of having one user interface” across disparate Android devices.
He does vow that he’ll “never do BYOD [bring your own device], because someone will get something other than an Apple product. And then I’ll be in the support business again.”
He says of the old myth that IT can’t support Apple in the enterprise: “Well, it’s true that you can’t tinker like you can with Windows. But we don’t want you to tinker, because we know what’s going to happen: the black screen of death.”
Escue says that RehabCare spends just 1.3% of revenue and 1.8% of operating expenses on IT. He says this is half of what the healthcare industry in general spends and a third of the professional services industry spend, citing Gartner.
“Our No. 1 priority isn’t device support and security. It’s the user experience,” says Escue. For now, he says, that means Apple.
