By Tisa Murdock, Product Line Manager, Enterprise Desktop
Physicians love the iPad for the mobility, lightness of form factor, screen resolution and long battery life. It is easy to take bedside and engage patients in their treatment and care. CIOs and IT struggle with how to introduce iPads into their environment, continue to protect patient data and not have to manage another device.
Delivering clinical workspaces and patient care applications as a managed service means IT can satisfy clinician’s requirements and alleviate security concerns. With a virtual clinical desktop, there is nothing stored on the device used to access the clinical desktop. Think of it as a TV screen. But a TV screen where you can interact with keystrokes and mouse clicks. Or in the case of the iPad finger gestures.
At Children’s Hospital Central California– their nutritionists had to take heavy binders bedside to consult with patients. Now all the information can be displayed through an iPad using a VMware View virtual clinical desktop. They have implemented about 400 View virtual clinical desktops and they are now considering a “Bring your own device policy” allowing physicians to purchase their own iPads. They simply provide physicians access to their point of care applications securely over the LAN or the WAN using VMware View.
Another emerging use case is clinical imaging. VMware View with PCoIP is brilliant at delivering lossless clinical images and proving to be an ideal solution for viewing these images remotely. Again- the iPad is quickly becoming the client of choice here as well. Imagine you are a physician and you get paged. You need to look at an image of your patient. Before VMware View you had to:
- Get in your car and drive to the hospital and use a dedicated workstation to check the image
- Have someone at the hospital look at it for you and report back
Physicians are demanding a better work life balance and using a VMware View to securely deliver images means that physicians can get that life work balance.
MidMichigan Health another VMware View customer with about 1200 virtualized point of care desktops in production are using thin clients within the hospital to access patient care applications and data. During a panel discussion on VDI for Healthcare we heard this comment about how delighted their physicians are with iPads and View, " I give the product a big thumbs up. I read a head CT in a restaurant last night during a business meeting and was able to give a preliminary report. The iPad screen is better than the laptop we had been using and the app speed is faster.” Nice!
Here at VMware we have recently installed a new demo in our Executive Briefing Center featuring View for Clinical Imaging. See firsthand how seamless the user experience is by stating your virtual desktop session with a clinical image on a laptop or zero client and then transfer that virtual desktop session to an iPad. Very Cool. Here is a picture of me showing a customer the demo.
For more information please see our website, watch some great videos from HIMSS12 or visit the VMware Healthcare team in the Intel Booth in Copenhagen for the HIMSS World of Health IT, May 7 – 9.
