A home visit is a live object. The family is watching a map. The clinician is moving. The operations desk is assigning the next job. HTTP polling turns that into a slideshow.
WebSockets (or Socket.IO on Node) keep a channel open: location, status, chat, and presence arrive as events. Authentication still matters — every socket joins a room only after a signed token. Redis is how that channel survives more than one server process.
We do not put sockets on every screen. Reporting dashboards can poll. The visit itself cannot. If the network drops, reconnect and backoff are part of the contract, not a bug to fix later.
That is why realtime is a NodeLyte service, not a library we mention in passing.
