Maintaining Access to Clinical Applications for Advocate Health

Based in Oak Brook, Illinois, Advocate Health Care is the largest fully integrated not-for-profit health care delivery system in metropolitan Chicago, and is recognized as one of the top ten systems in the country. Advocate is the second largest private employer in the state with more than 24,500 physicians and healthcare professionals. Advocate Health Care operates eight acute care, two children’s hospitals, several state-of-the-art medical facilities, a home health company and a physician’s network at over 200 sites statewide.

Challenges in the Wireless World

In order to further enhance the efficiencies of hospital staff, Advocate’s IT Group deployed a wireless network to give clinicians access to applications and medical data at the point of care.

A key challenge that Advocate’s IT Group faced dealt with wireless connectivity issues. As Advocate’s doctors and nurses moved through their facilities, they noticed that wireless access was sometimes intermittent. Lost connectivity would occur in certain hallways, near some types of medical equipment, or due to uncertain causes. Dan Lutter, Director of Field Technology Services, explains, ”Clinicians would lose coverage during their rounds and it would disconnect their Citrix session. We’d have doctors or nurses that were working on documents for 45 minutes, suddenly lose their network connection and get kicked out of the application – with all their work lost. This created a lot of frustration among our clinicians and made for very dissatisfied users.”

Advocates’ clinicians also had disconnects occur when handoffs between wireless subnets wasn’t smooth. This caused the user’s data to be lost and required re-logging in to the network, restarting applications, and redoing previously completed work.

“We were not seeing the efficiencies that we had expected from our mobile deployment. It was also impacting the IT support function. Of the service requests that came in from our mobile clinicians, roughly 60% were related to wireless connectivity issues, with the remaining 40% split evenly between device battery or application issues.”

Finding the Right Solution

“There were two solutions that we considered,” furthers Lutter, “one was network-based and the other was client-server software from NetMotion Wireless. After trialing each, we determined that Mobility XE from NetMotion Wireless was the right option for our environment.”

For Advocate Health, Mobility XE made their connectivity disruptions disappear. If a clinician lost their network connection or roamed to a different subnet, Mobility XE masked these disruptions or IP address changes from the Citrix server. In doing so, it kept the Citrix session alive, which in turn meant that the Cerner Millennium applications continued to function.

Ease of Deployment

Installing Mobility XE involves deploying client software to remote devices and also server software within the IT infrastructure. “We planned to deploy Mobility XE to our mobile devices over a weekend using LANDesk’s remote distribution tool.  In the end it only took one day to deploy with about a 95% success rate. The remaining 5% was due to devices that were powered down or off the network.”

Once deployed, clinicians saw no change to their sign-on procedure. Mobility XE uses existing authentication methods, so from the users’ perspective the only change they experienced was continuous connectivity to applications and no disruptions to their Citrix sessions.

Benefits of Mobility XE

“There was an unexpected benefit that we derived from Mobility XE,” adds Lutter, “we can now keep our devices’ Network Interface Card (NIC) drivers current without disrupting clinicians. This is a huge benefit.”

Following installation of Mobility XE, Lutter has seen a reduction in support requests from clinicians. “We’ve seen about a 30% reduction,” Lutter adds, “issues related to wireless connectivity have been reduced dramatically. Support requests these days are mostly related to battery charging problems or questions regarding applications.”

As Lutter concludes, “access to patient records and test results at the point of care can increase staff efficiency and ultimately help improve clinical outcomes. And, Mobility XE has provided us with a seamless, stable environment for our clinicians to work in.”