Case Study - Healthcare
Business Overview
HomeMD Housecall Services is a medical consultation firm located in the American state of Michigan, which sends nurse practitioners and other medical professionals to help patients in their homes.
This is especially useful for elderly home-bound patients, and as such, a large portion of HomeMD’s clientele reside in assisted-living facilities.
As part of their efforts to provide world-class care in patients’ homes, HomeMD employees strive to befriend their patients, providing them both medical and emotional support.
Background and Challenges
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Michigan, HomeMD could not interact with many immuno-compromised elderly patients in person. In order to address this, HomeMD provided many of its patients with tablets for remote teleconferencing, and provided many employees with tablets for updating charts during sessions. However, this caused a few new challenges:
- Many elderly patients did not understand how to use tablets and could not initiate remote consultations.
- Patients who used tablets for fun could tamper with important settings, making teleconferencing difficult. Employees who used the tablets could get distracted by games and social media, harming productivity and focus.
- Given the nature of the pandemic, HomeMD could not send technicians on-site for repairs in the event patient devices malfunctioned.
Industry: Healthcare
Location: Michigan, USA
Products: SureMDM and SureLock
Operating System: Android
Deployment Size: 500-1000
Challenges: HomeMD Housecall Services needed to safely continue providing home-based care to vulnerable patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing remote consultation. The company provided patients with tablets, but many patients didn’t know how to use them. Plus, employees needed to use tablets, but entertainment apps could be distracting.
Solution: SureLock restricted the tablets to only the essential functions needed for remote care, streamlining the experience for patients and employees alike. Thanks to SureMDM’s Remote Access feature, healthcare staff could remotely initiate teleconferencing sessions on the patient’s tablet.
Solution:
SureMDM by 42Gears and SureLock by 42Gears
HomeMD discovered 42Gears’ software, and used it to overcome the obstacles inherent to remote teleconferencing with elderly patients. The company especially appreciated how affordable 42Gears’ software was relative to the utility it provided.
Using SureMDM, the 42Gears device management solution, and SureLock, the 42Gears device lockdown solution, HomeMD turned remote consultations from a challenge into its strength:
- SureMDM offered a Remote Access feature that let HomeMD employees activate conferencing on patient tablets remotely, without any action required from the patient.
- SureLock allowed HomeMD to lock its Android tablets down to only the teleconferencing software patients needed. This ensured they could not tamper with devices and cause unintended issues. This also ensured employees could not get distracted
- SureMDM allowed technicians to repair devices remotely in most instances, making it easier to adhere to social distancing guidelines.
Benefits
- Because technological literacy was no longer an obstacle to providing patient care, HomeMD could continue to provide care when its competitors could not.
- By “geriactric-proofing” tablets, 42Gears software allowed HomeMD to distribute tablets without fear of patients misusing them. This let HomeMD distribute tablets more widely than would otherwise be possible. By locking tablets down, HomeMD also ensured that staff productivity would remain high on business tablets.
- Remote troubleshooting helped HomeMD to triple its footprint during the pandemic without compromising the ease with which tablets could be fixed.
Testimonial
“In short, 42Gears has allowed us to scale a remote telehealth offering to our geriatric patients that we could not possibly have done otherwise. When Covid-19 shut down all of Michigan, most of the housecall companies we compete against stopped seeing their patients, putting the assisted living facilities that these patients reside within into a very concerning situation. We were still able to continue seeing our patients without interruption through the rapid deployment of our tablet program, which allowed us to significantly increase market share as we filled in the voids where our competitors could not compete. Over the last year, during Covid-19, our company has increased our footprint while tripling our size.”
- Jim Tougas,
CEO and Founder, HomeMD Housecall Services