St. Luke's Episcopal Health System

St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System has long been a pioneer in both medical procedures and medical uses of technology. Its Texas Heart Institute performed the first successful human heart transplant in the U.S. Among numerous awards in many areas of medical practice, it has been named a top ten Cardiovascular Center for 17 consecutive years in the highly regarded annual survey conducted by U.S. News & World Report.

Maintaining a Secure Connection to Point‐of‐Care Applications

St. Luke’s building structures have changed over the course of nearly five decades of providing patient care. As new buildings were constructed and older ones renovated, St. Lukes began installing wireless access points throughout areas where instant access to information was important for patient care, such as the ER, and to central clinician station locations and in hallways near patients’ rooms. But maintaining a continuous connection to charting applications was not a simple task.

“Clinicians using handheld devices had trouble maintaining their sessions walking around the floors,” explains Gene Gretzer, senior analyst and wireless initiative project leader. “As doctors and nurses walked through areas where the wireless network did not reach effectively,” he continues, “such as long hallways, onto elevators, or through older areas in the hospital, they’d lose their network connection. This caused their legacy VPN and applications to fail which required the clinicians to re‐login, restart applications and re‐enter any data that may not have been transmitted.”

The situation frustrated busy doctors and nurses who saw their time wasted on devices that were supposed to be increasing their productivity.

Another issue Gretzer grappled with was wireless security. With both concerns over wireless vulnerabilities and HIPAA standards for data protection, St. Luke’s wanted to ensure patient data could not be compromised. Their security concerns did not stop there, however. Gretzer also had the foresight to consider that “mobile” devices by their very nature could easily be misplaced or potentially stolen. Thus management tools were also needed that could ensure their security.

Finding the Right Solution

To solve these problems Gretzer and St. Luke’s IT team implemented NetMotion Wireless’ Mobility XE mobile VPN. Mobility XE provided the cure to the application disruption and security concerns they were struggling with. Installation of Mobility XE was simple and straightforward. Server software was deployed within the IT department and client software installed on their laptops, tablets and handheld devices. With Mobility XE running, all data transmitted between the server and client devices was encrypted using AES 128‐bit security. Mobility XE also acted as a second firewall, devices not recognized by the Mobility server were not allowed to access the network.

Mobility XE also insulates applications from lost connections and automatically reestablishes the connection once network access resumes. Thus, clinicians no longer dealt with dropped network connections and crashed applications. While out of range, applications are held in place and upon re‐entry into a wireless coverage area, the applications pick up exactly where they left off.