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Winter driving in the mountains of central British Columbia can be difficult and sometimes dangerous. So the Interior Health Authority that delivers services to a scattered population of 700,000 residents is anxious to cut travel time for physicians, other health care professionals and their patients in a region where both a nurse and a doctor have been killed in traffic accidents in recent years.
It's a situation in which lives may be saved through technology that will let consultants view X-ray images on their home computers in the middle of the night, giving immediate advice to emergency room doctors or family physicians and often avoiding the risk and expense of a three- or four-hour drive.
The benefits are obvious to Dr. David Stewart, a urologist and chief of the department of surgery at the Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops. He says the health authority's Microsoft Windows Server 2003-based remote access system lets him examine X-ray images over the Internet, while talking on the phone with a local physician, who could be hundreds of kilometres away, but can view the same image simultaneously. In many cases, Dr. Stewart says he can see from the X-ray that surgery is not needed, thus saving the patient an ambulance trip and a hospital stay, while generating huge savings for the health authority.
The system also allows him to shave some time off his long working day by viewing patients' lab results and charts on his home computer in the mornings before doing his rounds at the hospital. "It gives me more time at home with my family," he says.
Dr. Stewart is one of a growing number of Canadians now taking advantage of technologies and practices that make it easy for people to access their workplace technology while they are at home or on the road. They are often described as teleworkers -- a term that includes telecommuters, who spend part of their working week at home, and mobile workers, who access their organization's technology and data from satellite offices, clients' sites, hotel rooms, Internet cafés or anywhere they can log on to a network.
Technologies that make this possible, such as broadband access, wireless networking, voice over Internet, more powerful portable computing and better security systems, have recently become cheaper, easier to use and so ubiquitous that more than half of the 109 million households in the United States have a digital home office, according to a recent report by the Boston-based research firm Yankee Group.
In Canada, there are no current statistics on the number of teleworkers, but Bob Fortier, president of the Canadian Telework Association estimates there are at least 1.5 million, and believes this number will grow to two million in the next few years. He says it's difficult to know the numbers because probably as many as half of the employees who work from home do so informally, with the agreement of their immediate bosses, but without official sanction or support from their organizations.
A survey of senior executives worldwide, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit for AT&T Corp., found that the percentage of companies where no one works from home on a regular basis is expected to drop to 20 per cent next year from 46 per cent last year. The survey notes that the ability to work remotely over networks has become a necessity in today's business environment as "the expectation that everyone will be in the same office is fast being eroded by actual business practices."
And dramatic savings can be achieved by moving out of traditional offices into virtual offices, organized around networks rather than buildings, according to an AT&T study of its own telework programs that were expected to generate $150-million in increased productivity and reduced overhead during the past fiscal year.
Unfortunately, telework causes headaches for many IT managers, because it is being done informally without appropriate policies and technology support, Mr. Fortier says.
In fact, the very sophistication of today's home technology, with its wireless networks and always-on broadband connections can exaggerate the potential problems, as IT managers now have to worry about virus and hacker attacks through home networks, or constant demands for support from people whose office software has been disabled by an upgrade to their kids' video game, says Jeff Crews, vice-president of infrastructure management and marketing at Toronto-based technology service provider Allstream Corp.
So is the physician's balm the bane of existence for Roy Southby, chief information office at B.C.'s Interior Health Authority? Not at all, he says. On the contrary, he maintains that his life is a lot easier as a result of the technology that provides remote access to data and applications for more than 1,200 doctors and numerous other health care professionals.
Mr. Southby says the system avoids most of the key problems telework can create -- problems arising from poor security and the difficulty of providing technical support and management for a wide variety of mobile and home-based tools and applications.
Security risks and management hassles are minimized, he says, because all the information and software accessed by remote users is retained in a central location on IBM servers that can accommodate up to 200 users logging on simultaneously. So long as they have a digital security certificate to prove that they are who they say they are, users can log on to the servers over the Internet, no matter what kind of browser or computer they have.
Instead of downloading data from the server, they view it and manipulate it remotely, so that when they save their work, it is saved on the server, not their home computer. This has two key advantages, according to Mr. Southby. Not only does it avoid the risk of someone else seeing confidential information left on a home computer, but also it takes advantage of situations where bandwidth is limited by minimizing the amount of data that has to travel over networks. "It's amazing how quickly it can handle X-rays," he says.
Furthermore, he says, it means that technology managers only need to maintain and upgrade the software on the server, rather than having to send a continual stream of software fixes and security upgrades to thousands of pieces of remote equipment.
Calgary-based WestJet Airlines Ltd. has taken a similar approach, using technology from Citrix Systems Inc., to provide remote access to centralized data and applications for pilots, flight attendants, ground crews and other employees, who could be in any one of 40 airports and other locations across the country, away at conferences or working from home.
Steve Stretch, the airline's manager of application services, says his life used to be far more complicated because there were 10 different remote access technologies in use at one time. This has now been reduced to three, he says, explaining that the Citrix system works for most purposes, but he still needs other access methods for call centre applications and some highly specialized aviation-related software.
"It has been dramatically simplified, primarily because a lot of the costs have been driven out of remote access. In the past you would have to maintain a big bank of telephone lines and auto-dialers and different technologies just to get people connected to the organization," he says.
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