There is definitely an art to recognising when accepted procedure isn’t necessarily the best way to do something. And it sometimes takes a brave person within an organisation to put their head over the parapet to point it out. But I have faith in people and gradually more IT managers aren’t settling for 2nd best, “work-arounds” and inertia.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
For as long as I can remember the NHS has been promoting home based care, where District Nurses, Midwives and other mobile clinicians have been asked to access live clinical applications whilst in the patient’s home. Typically staff are handed a laptop computer loaded with an IPSec VPN or SSL client and a form of two factor authentication. So far so good. Really?
The problem comes when they actually try and use it. The connectivity is awful (most of the time) and users end up leaving their PC in the car and fall back to paper records. This means that expensive medical staff finish early to go home or to the clinic (where there’s a fast, reliable connection) to catch up on the days notes, if they have time, perhaps tomorrow!
So the IT department under pressure from the clinical lead and HR decides to do something about it. But what?
The mobile phone data network is slowly getting better but speed isn’t always the issue, it’s the variability, the flakiness. The drop outs, the 3G to 2G to no signal and back again is the issue. That and the impatience of TCP, the re-sends, the lost data, the 15 minutes log-on times. Argghhh!
Keep calm, there must be a solution.
Yes, more Internet bandwidth.
Accelerators
Brief-casing
Intelligent Pens
Remember I mentioned the work-arounds. Here they are above. Those and going back to clinic at 3pm to write the notes up.
There is another way which some of you have already adopted. It’s called NetMotion Mobility XE.
It’s a VPN solution, and on paper it looks like any other, BUT it isn’t. It really isn’t. For a start it actually works over flaky, low bandwidth networks because its underlying architecture was designed for that environment. The system is secure, EAL4 and FIPPS. It has NAC, Policy and Reporting. It will reduce your ISP and Mobile Data Costs because far less data will be sent (and with the old system, never received) and staff won’t finish at 3 and drive to a clinic because they will be able to access clinical applications and data LIVE!
Ah! I hear you say. We don’t have any signal in our area. If that is true, and I doubt it in most cases then I really can’t help, but the chances are that you do have a connection but a weak one that your existing VPN can’t make use of. That’s the difference, WE CAN.
And with our “Application Persistence” we can hold the connection even when it goes completely, and when it returns the application and VPN will just carry on where it left off. No lost data. No fed up District Nurses. Fewer calls to IT support from irate mobile clinicians.
Have a look at our web pages dedicated to NetMotion Mobility.
Then we can put you in touch with our customers who come from the ranks of the NHS, Councils, Utility Companies and Emergency Services.
I really look forward to hearing about your connectivity issues and to assess whether NetMotion Mobility and Net-Ctrl know-how can help fix your problems.
Call me: Tony Pullon 01473 281 211