The customer was a 357-bed hospital in Waterbury, Conn, caring for about 15,000 in-patients a year, more than 160,000 outpatients and almost 60,000 in its emergency room.
Clearly, a hospital that needed to be up and running at all times. But there was a problem. The facility was hamstrung by a combination of applications running on different operating systems, and some, hosted off-site, like a nurse reporting application, which caused delays in patient status and care while the nurses attended to technical problems.
Add to that the fact that this disconnection impeded workflow and productivity, and you have a real challenge.
The hospital chose to address the situation with a software solution, RES Workspace Manager, which provided a secure way to streamline its day-to-day IT operations. The solution separated desktops from the operating system, centralizing the management, creation and composition of user workspaces to provide a unified desktop so a staff member can sign in anywhere, anytime, and still see the same log-in and commands, according to a company overview.
It’s also helped with regulation issues. "RES has been useful in controlling the HIPAA compliance and security aspects of our workstations by limiting USB access and controlling log-ins,” said hospital network engineer George Adamo. “The Citrix profile management process is working fine and is now a part of our virtualized Citrix XenApp farm. My next task will be to establish a testing sandbox leading to an update of RES. We will also be looking into the fault tolerant features of RES as it is becoming increasingly central to the user experience."
The software helped solve other problems for the hospital, including slow log-in scripts and system access that hampered clinicians from filing online reports quickly, and helped the hospital control printers, making the prescription process easier for doctors.
“A dynamic desktop environment provides clinicians with on-the-go access that is a necessity in a fast-paced work environment and has a direct impact on patient care,” Adamo added. “With RES Workspace Manager, our IT department now has a solution to manage and control user workspaces across the entire enterprise and in the process, we have eliminated many of the challenges that staff faced.”
Waterbury’s IT team can now provide nurses and the rest of Waterbury Hospital’s staff with the applications, data, printing and personalized settings that they need to operate at an efficient pace, the source noted.
One of the core goals of Meaningful Use, which rewards healthcare organizations for providing quality care at lower costs, is to deploy health information exchange solutions to share electronic medical records and information between healthcare providers and facilities.
Waterbury Hospital’s upgrade of its IT system will aid the hospital in its ability to achieve this.
Edited by
Braden Becker
