Encompass Home Health Mobilizes In-home Patient Care with Citrix XenMobile MDM

Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and with locations throughout Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Oregon, Encompass Home Health is a Medicare-certified agency that delivers home health, hospice and pediatric care to homebound patients. Starting with a single location, Encompass’s network has grown to over 100 geographically dispersed branches made up of over 50 well-respected agencies, and is rapidly becoming the standard for patients who need superior in-home care.

With a commitment to superior care, Encompass employs a combination of high-quality medical professionals and technology that arms their staff with the latest information about each patient. This information is communicated routinely with the entire care team, and provides families and physicians with updates about the patient's status and the care delivered during each visit. Critical to the company’s technology strategy is its mobile deployment – consisting of more than 2,300 Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tabs. These devices are equipped with a mobile, clinical documentation app developed by Homecare Homebase, an industry-leading developer of home health software. At the center of the company’s mobile initiative are Scott Beard, Director of Information Technology, and Maurice Moss, Manager of Mobile Support.

The challenge: mobilize in-home patient care

With more than 2,300 skilled nurses, therapists, and home health aides who visit patients in their homes every day, Encompass needed to arm its field of medical professionals with a mobile solution that provided them the information that they needed to deliver care to patients. “The mobile nature of our workforce makes this initiative absolutely mission-critical to our company,” explains Beard.

When caregivers visit a patient, they utilize the Homecare Homebase application on their tablet to complete that visit. Based on the type of care required, the application makes certain patient information available, guides the professional through a series of best practice-based steps and has them enter data about the patient’s status, information the patient shared during the visit and the actions taken during that visit. Then, through a proprietary store and forward application, Homecare Homebase synchronizes information about the visit back to the office in less than two minutes.

In addition to arming its medical staff with mobile devices, Encompass also provides its sales and marketing professionals with Samsung Galaxy Tabs that have a Homecare Homebase-developed CRM application installed called Referral Source Link. Despite its focus on sales and marketing, the application also enables the sales team to access key patient data and is subject to the data security policies for HIPAA compliance.

Prior to talking with Citrix, Encompass was using another cloud-based Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution but was experiencing reliability issues. MDM reliability is part of a larger effort throughout Encompass to maintain technology resilience and keep the company’s highly interdependent logistical business moving. In a business with centralized IT, distributed offices and truly mobile workers, ensuring uptime of the technology is of paramount importance. “The cost of downtime is huge,” notes Beard. “Without a reliable MDM solution in place, we have no way of being able to successfully manage the remote devices and assist staff when needed.”

One best practice Beard and Moss employ is to designate a mobility point-of-contact in each office, educate them about the mobile solution and have them maintain a set of spare devices that can be easily provisioned should a field worker’s device get lost, stolen or broken. “It’s not their primary role, but critical to our business,” explains Moss. “Since they are an extension of our team, they are available to replace damaged or lost devices quickly and avoid the added expense of having us ship devices next-day.

With these goals in mind, Beard and Moss laid out their requirements for MDM:

• Reliability. As the platform for the most mission-critical technology in the company, MDM reliability is vital. “Our mobile deployment is absolutely critical to our business.” says Beard. “The new system absolutely needed to work.”
• Security and HIPAA compliance. “Having a secure system is extremely important because we’re dealing with patient data that is subject to HIPAA regulations,” explains Beard. “We had to make sure that the MDM tools can properly account for the deployed devices, have them passcode protected, keep the data encrypted, and then, if they’re lost or stolen, remotely wipe them to ensure data integrity.”
• Reporting. ”We needed our MDM to be able to not only wipe the device if it gets lost or stolen, but then report what security steps have been completed for HIPAA reporting. We also need to report our device inventory and status at any given time for both compliance and asset tracking purposes. Our mobile devices account for one of the costliest line items in our company, so managing our device inventory helps us streamline and control these costs.”
  

The solution: XenMobile MDM supports mission-critical mobile initiative

With those use cases and requirements in mind, Beard and Moss evaluated MDM vendors. “What we were really looking for was a partner, not just a vendor,” notes Beard. Beard and Moss highlighted some of the reasons they chose to partner with Citrix.

• Support. “Support is really important for us,” explains Beard. “From the very beginning when our sales engineer custom-developed a set of Crystal reports specific to our needs to our interactions with the post-sales support team, Citrix has been really great about supporting us and listening to our needs.”
• Security and compliance. “If a device walks away, the data on the device is not only encrypted in the application itself but I have the added guarantee that the device is encrypted and protected with Citrix,” says Moss. “I can wipe it as soon as I find out that the device is missing and I can sleep at night knowing that our patient’s Personal Health Information (PHI) is not exposed or in jeopardy.”
• Ease of use. Moss notes that product ease-of-use was a factor in the team’s decision to go with Citrix. “The interface is definitely intuitive,” he explains, “I like that the dashboard gives me an up-to-date snapshot of what’s going on in our environment.”
• Integration. Moss also calls out real-time directory integration as a differentiator. “It’s helpful because in the past we had to have a separate username and password for our mobile deployment and now we can avoid that extra hurdle.”
  

With Citrix as its MDM partner, the Encompass team has a reliable, secure mobility platform that is mission-critical to the company’s superior home health care and hospice practice.