Anyone familiar with patients’ healthcare records knows the associated data compliance rules can be a burden to bear — especially home-care nurses who schlep around 25 pounds of paperwork daily.

VITAS Healthcare Corp. used ServiceNow  and cloud computing to reduce paper and trips back and forth for its nursing staff, according to Naresh Samlal (pictured), director of mobility, process and automation at VITAS Healthcare.

“Last year we completed a deployment of 8,000 mobile devices to our patient care staff,” Samlal said, a featured customer at the ServiceNow Knowledge17 event in Orlando, Florida.

Prior to this roll-out, the nurses made multiple trips per day to patients’ homes and to the VITAS office carrying about 25 pounds of paperwork, Samlal told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Vitas worked with ServiceNow Inc. and others to develop a program for mobile devices that eliminated a lot of paperwork and gives nurses real-time access to patients’ healthcare data. Naturally, this sent the security flag up, which is where cloud technology was very useful.

“No data actually lives on the device; it’s all a matter of the device being able to access the cloud — so through Wi-Fi if they are at a hospital, if they’re at a patient’s home, or LTE coverage,” he said.

Still, the company wanted to ensure that the devices did not get lost or fall into the wrong hands.

“Coupled with a few other pieces that work well with ServiceNow, we now have that single pane of glass so that we can really know exactly where devices are and manage them in real time,” Samlal stated.

Upgrade headache medicine

In the time that VITAS has used ServiceNow, the biannual upgrades have been exceptionally smooth, although skipping one upgrade and then having to catch up can be confusing, said Samlal.

“It’s not ideal, because you introduce a lot of unknowns if you have to leapfrog,” he said.

ServiceNow allows users to suppress some features of upgrades until the are ready to go live with them, he added. In VITAS’ latest upgrade, for instance, “I’m suppressing the UI [User Interface] upgrade and taking the platform upgrade, so the look and feel stays the same,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge17. (* Disclosure: ServiceNow Inc. sponsored this Knowledge17 segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither ServiceNow nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE