Electronic medical records (EMR) have become a quintessential part of modern healthcare. Doctors and nurses are busy. Patients want more personalized care. So the ability to quickly access accurate patient records online, without losing facetime, is transformative.
What’s more, clinicians increasingly want to be able to do this from any device and in any treatment setting (in the doctor’s office, bedside, over the phone, etc.). To do this seamlessly and securely, modern hospitals also now need a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to run an EMR solution.
[Read More: VDI Becomes A Reality for Hospitals]
When the Women’s College Hospital (WCH) redeveloped their medical center, they made the VMware Horizon VDI solution part of their healthcare transformation. Here’s how the leading academic and ambulatory, or outpatient, care hospital in Canada sped up processes for busy doctors and nurses with Horizon.
VDI Expands Care Beyond Hospital Walls
WCH became an independent healthcare facility once again in 2006 after having been consolidated with two other institutions. Years later, WCH set out to create their own hospital of the future in downtown Toronto.
This included building a new IT infrastructure that would help them achieve their vision of innovation in healthcare. IT needed the right technology to move more of caregivers’ workflows online and deliver consistent online experiences no matter where or how they work—all without needing to increase headcount to manage it.
For WCH, that technology came in the form of Epic EMR software on a VMware private cloud and Horizon VDI technology to deliver it.
[Read More: What’s New with VMware Horizon 7]
Horizon enables IT to:
- Standardize clinical desktops. Prior to Horizon, WCH clinicians remotely accessed their in-office desktop systems via their own personal laptops. Now, workers can access a diverse range of applications from a variety of devices, and the experience is always the same.
- Run an EMR solution. Electronic medical records are much easier and faster to access across different treatment settings. This technology is critical to accelerating clinicians’ workflows, and a VDI enables IT to securely and reliably deliver and manage it.
- Operate lean. The speed and simplicity of the Horizon VDI solution allows them to quickly deploy, manage and scale virtual desktops and applications.
Agile, Lean and Ready for More
Horizon VDI technology made a huge impact on the work productivity levels of caregivers. It now takes less time for patient data to get delivered to clinicians, and the improved flexibility to access data from anywhere means less downtime. Now that the virtual desktop experience is always the same, no matter the device, caregivers also spend less time adjusting to new interfaces.
[Read More: VDI Becomes A Reality for Hospitals]
This newfound efficiency better equips the organization’s 800 health professionals to handle the hundreds of thousands of patient visits they serve in a year.
Horizon allowed IT to accomplish this on less resources, too. Aside from operational efficiencies, the VMware virtualization stack leaves plenty of room in the data center for other IT projects.
“If your virtual infrastructure isn’t rock solid, you’re going to spend cycles trying to fix it. But that’s the last thing on my mind with this environment. It is rock solid.”
— Brendan Kwolek, IT Director, Women’s College Hospital
