* Wireless helps home caregivers do better job
Lee Memorial Health System in Fort Meyers, Fla., is using wireless laptops and 1XRTT cellular data services from Sprint to improve patient care and reduce the administrative burden on some 80 home-health workers.
The real-time nature of the wireless network saves each employee about an hour a day – or an expected total of 16,000 hours per year. But only because at the heart of the setup is NetMotion Wireless Mobility XE client/server internetwork roaming and management software, which contributes AES encryption to the configuration.
Nurses, therapists, aides and other caregivers can securely upload and download patient information in and out of remote electronic charts instead of bouncing back and forth from the hospital to do so, says Bob Votta, director of network technical services at the three-facility acute care hospital system.
“Traditional VPN solutions were bulky. The NetMotion software gives a direct connection from a worker’s laptop to our network that’s encrypted and meets HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] requirements. It is transparent whether users are inside or outside the walls of our building,” Votta says.
Because patient information must remain secure, sometimes workers couldn’t even make a phone call to find out what they needed to know – such as possible drug interactions with an existing medication a patient might be taking, he explains. This often resulted in rescheduled visits, which hindered patient care and increased costs.
Lee Memorial has been generally increasing home care, both to make patients more comfortable and to reduce inpatient costs, Votta says. The hospital upgraded its clinical and financial computing platforms for home health workers last May to give them more ready access to patient information and to help avoid paper-based or cumbersome dial-up patient chart entry.
In the past, says Jim Krouse, senior network engineer, caregivers would try to sidestep a hospital visit by dialing into remote-access servers from their own homes after work and launching an upload off an automatic script.
“But that was problematic. They’re not computer people and often couldn’t tell if the transfer worked. We wanted to get rid of that scenario,” he says.
NetMotion Mobility allows application persistence among IP networks regardless of the underlying wireless or wired medium. Caregivers then, could roam from the cellular WAN to an 802.11-based wireless LAN, for example, with no interruption in their application. In addition to using Sprint’s CDMA-based 1XRTT service Lee Memorial has been installing Airespace 802.11a/b/g wireless LANs for the past two years.
