As the healthcare industry moves into a more connected and digitized world, this new world poses unprecedented challenges for healthcare IT. Today’s infrastructure needs to leverage new technologies in order to support hyper-connected systems and deliver agile, secure, and efficient solutions to improve patient care. At the same time, the systems should support legacy applications while complying with ever-stricter norms for keeping patient's medical information safe. Digital workspace solutions empower modern healthcare workforce dynamics by enabling quick and secure access to apps and data, facilitating effective and efficient care to thousands of people.
IT challenges/solutions for the healthcare industry
Below are challenges faced while implementing such systems for the healthcare industry:
HPE, Citrix, and NVIDIA have come together to design a solution that addresses the above challenges to meet the current and future needs of a digital workspace for healthcare organizations. The idea is to deliver this experience cost-effectively using the right mix of technology as cost-effective as possible.
The HPE Reference Architecture for client virtualization in Healthcare addresses these critical challenges by integrating new, future-ready technologies and intelligently leveraging the software-defined infrastructure capability provided by HPE Synergy.
The key components of the solution include the following:
- HPE Synergy platform: Composable infrastructure for compute, storage, and fabric
- HPE 3PAR Storage: Enterprise-class, all-flash storage array to host medical apps and data
- NVIDIA T4 GPU: High-quality, visual imagery for medical scans and inferencing
- Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service: On-demand app and desktop delivery platform
- Citrix Cloud: Cloud-based platform that hosts and administers Citrix services
- Citrix Content Collaboration: Secure file sharing and collaboration including workflows
A closer look at how this solution addresses key challenges
The HPE Synergy platform is a software-defined infrastructure solution that enables fluid pools of compute, storage, and fabric resources into any configuration for a modern healthcare organization. This platform lets organizations run varied physical, virtual, and containerized workloads that cater to the diverse needs of users and industry, ranging from text-based VDI workloads for receptionists to high-end AI/ML compute solutions for clinical research. The HPE Synergy platform is accompanied by HPE 3PAR All-Flash Storage Array, which provides unmatched, predictable, ultra-low latency for critical workloads in healthcare IT. This translates into improved clinician productivity. HPE 3PAR ensures 99.9999% availability to make sure that VDI, PACS system, EHR DB, and user data is always accessible, guaranteeing the continuity of hospital operations, diagnostic services, and clinical research.
High-end graphics applications and GPU-driven artificial intelligence continue to change the nature of healthcare. Additionally, GPUs are also helping to address use cases that were previously not possible in a traditional VDI environment like inferencing and Remote care. NVIDIA T4 GPUs are designed to accelerate diverse workloads like AI, ML, Deep Learning, VDI Graphics, and Inferencing. HPE Synergy composable platform along with NVIDIA T4 cards enables healthcare organizations to repurpose powerful GPUs and allows utilization of resources across different use cases (VDI, AI/ML) based on time of day, season, or even on-demand which brings down the cost dramatically and empowers researchers to arrive at faster, better and deeper insights.
In modern healthcare environments, medical staff needs access to their applications and data across facilities, devices, and networks. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is the industry's leading solution that enables rapid delivery and easy access of virtualized apps and desktops in a secure and reliable manner, on any device, from any network. This enables Healthcare organizations to create new value-based business models like Telehealth, mHealth, and Remote care. Citrix Cloud facilitates a true hybrid model that allows organizations to host apps and desktops resources on-premises for maximum performance, security, and compliance, while a cloud-based management plane simplifies and offloads administration bringing down operational expenses and maintenance overhead. Citrix Content Collaboration is used in this solution, which is a HIPAA-compliant file-sync and sharing solution that enables healthcare providers to securely exchange records and data among medical staff and external users like patients, insurance providers, etc. to enable collaborative workforce interactions.
Below is a quick summary depicting how the solution addresses the challenges:
Unmatched client virtualization performance means better user experience
To summarize, HPE Synergy Composable infrastructure with Citrix and NVIDIA enables unmatched client virtualization performance in the healthcare industry. This performance translates into a superb end-user experience for both accelerated and non-accelerated workloads with improved security and compliance.
For more information, check out the paper "HPE Reference Architecture for client virtualization in healthcare on HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure". This reference architecture is based on decades of HPE's technical experience and provides a blueprint for a truly hybrid digital workspace solution for the modern healthcare industry. The paper also covers best practices and LoginVSI benchmarking results to help enterprise architects and IT managers with sizing and performance.
Have questions or feedback? Let us know in the comments below or get in touch with your HPE representative.
Yash Gumashta
About the author:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
twitter.com/HPE_Servers
linkedin.com/showcase/hpe-servers-and-systems/
hpe.com/servers
