Case Study: Visiting Nurse Service Of New York – Enabling Data Access At The Point Of Care

By NetMotion Wireless

Since 1893, the Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY) has been providing home healthcare to patients in New York City. Today, the organization's 2,500 clinicians deliver home healthcare services ranging from pediatric to elder care, psychiatric assessments to AIDS treatment, and short–term interventions to long–term management. VNSNY clinicians visit patients throughout New York City's five boroughs, Westchester County, and Nassau County on Long Island. VNSNY is the largest home healthcare organization in the United States; in a typical year, its clinicians make more than 2.2 million visits to more than 115,000 patients.

One of the organization's strengths is its drive to develop innovative ways of using technology to improve patient outcomes. VNSNY leads the way when it comes to testing and implementing new methods of delivering patient care, enhancing communications with its physician and hospital partners, and promoting operational efficiency.

Since the mid–1990s, VNSNY has been working to eliminate its clinicians' use of paper forms. Clinicians originally recorded notes by hand during their daily patient rounds and also attempted to fill out forms while attending to patients. To simplify access to patient data, VNSNY deployed tablet PCs to their mobile workforce. This gave the nurses remote access to their main database via dial-up or 802.11 wireless connection at any of their regional offices. Over the years this has been in place, the clinicians have seen productivity enhancements from easier access to patient data. But more recently the IT team noticed spikes in data traffic when clinicians connected to the VNSNY network at the beginning of the workday to download new patient information to their tablets, and at the end of the workday to upload new data from that day's visits. These spikes in data transmissions started to cause a slow down in access to their servers, which in turn threatened the productivity improvements that VNSNY had realized.

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