Staying Connected to Improve Patient Care for VNSNY

The Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY) provides home healthcare to patients throughout New York City’s five boroughs. Today, the organization has 3,500 clinicians, who, in a typical year, make more than 2.2 million visits to more than 115,000 patients.

Using Technology to Improve Patient Outcomes

One of the organization’s strengths is its drive to develop innovative ways of using technology to improve patient outcomes. To simplify access to patient data, VNSNY deployed tablet PCs with wireless data cards to their mobile workforce. This gave the nurses remote access to their main database and allowed greater, more ubiquitous access to information at any time during the day over different network coverage areas.

Overcoming Challenges

Increased access to information created challenges for VNSNY’s IT team, including complexity of operations. In addition, the team was equally concerned with data security. VNSNY’s IT team needed to streamline the switch between different networks and ensure that data transmissions were secured. After reviewing three different solutions, their team decided on NetMotion Wireless’ Mobility XE mobile VPN.

Benefits

“We’ve seen many advantages with Mobility XE,” declares Randy Cleghorne, Director of IT at VNSNY. “Beyond its capabilities to let our clinicians roam across different networks securely, we can also control which websites clinicians access, and we are able to push out anti‐virus updates to the remote client devices.

“Our goal was not to manage clinicians, our goal was to provide and facilitate access to information they need to do their jobs. The technology could not get in the way of their ability to deliver service to their patients.”

“Using Mobility XE, VNSNY’s clinicians are now able to focus more of their attention on their patients and not on the technologies they use.”