Virtual desktop infrastructure solutions can transform the patient-clinician interaction. Here are three big advantages of VDI that are attracting the attention of healthcare providers.
Patients like the reassurance of that visual contact, too. They’re looking for a smooth, seamless interaction, and they need to feel confident that their key medical data is at the clinician’s fingertips. Most importantly, the patient wants to be heard and then cared for. The resulting experience will leave either a good or a bad impression of that specific encounter.
Even before the pandemic, healthcare systems were discovering that virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can do a phenomenal job of meeting these needs and delivering exceptional clinical experiences. That’s only going to accelerate in today’s still-challenging medical environments. HPE and VMware are partnering to deliver next-generation capabilities, and I recently recorded a webinar on that topic alongside VMware’s Mike Lonze, Senior Director of Strategic Healthcare Alliances, and J. Joshua Wilda, CIO of University of Michigan Health - West. It’s a great resource, available on-demand, and it will give you the latest insights on our joint solutions: Delivering the Clinical Experience as a Service.
Here I want to cover three big advantages of VDI that are attracting the attention of healthcare providers:
1. You can deliver great clinical experiences anywhere, from any device. Besides the ability to deliver and support nearly all clinical workflows and keeping them active while moving from location to location, today’s VDI systems now can support telehealth visits – this is a new paradigm. Let’s say you’re in your laptop, or on your iPad, reading your email, working on an open document, and you are monitoring three different patients in your EHR. You can easily switch between multiple applications because, remember, what you're seeing is essentially just a window into your virtual desktop, which is running in the data center. That multi-app capability can improve the whole patient-care workflow in a telehealth patient visit context. Everything that you need is there.
VDI can also give you a smooth transition from one device to another. For example, you could start a telehealth visit by talking to a patient on your phone or you on the laptop, and let's say you now need to move to a desktop in your office. You can quickly reconnect to the same session. You can say, “Hey, can you hold for me a moment … this is going to take just 15 seconds for me to reconnect.” Then you log into your desktop, where you may have multiple monitors, and you can now start documenting. It a seamless interaction that’s more efficient and reassuring for both the patient and the clinician.
2. Your data is secure. Security is paramount, of course, in any kind of medical interaction. With virtual desktop infrastructure, everything is running in the data center – your applications and data are not being pushed out to the actual end points, where they might be vulnerable to theft or loss of a device. In addition, VDI systems from VMware and HPE provide a highly secure environment with multiple, seamlessly integrated layers of security that operate tightly together. And if the solution is running on HPE servers, you’re protected by our server infrastructure security solutions – HPE Trusted Supply Chain and Silicon Root of Trust technologies.
3. As-a-service platforms can help you stay ready for what’s next. The pace of change in healthcare is very rigorous, and healthcare providers typically project their infrastructure needs three years into the future. Few even try to go five years out.
This is where edge-to-cloud architectures can help. HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform enables healthcare IT organizations to stand up forward-looking solutions without the need for major upfront investments. It’s a pay-as-you go solution that includes all of the software and hardware you need, as well as services to keep everything updated and running smoothly. HPE metering technologies monitor your usage, and you’re charged on a single monthly bill based on that. HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform includes a buffer of capacity so if you need more compute, for example, typically it’s already on the floor, ready to be consumed; you just have to turn it on. It takes a lot of the unpredictability out of budgeting, acquisition and implementation cycles.
So let’s say you have a new version of VDI that you need to roll out. The infrastructure is already there. You don't have to work through the usual acquisition cycle. You’re not faced with new operational headaches. You can, in a sense, “spin up” improved clinical experiences, or at least the resources that underpin them. This is powerful!
Delivering the future of healthcare
The combination of VDI and edge-to-cloud architectures has a bright future in healthcare. It’s true that there’s a healthy element of competition here – healthcare organizations know that the clinical experience can be a differentiator, and they’re very committed to understanding how it’s perceived. Physicians want to be perceived as being highly tech-savvy, and they want to secure high patient ratings on social channels. But the big driver is, of course, simply the desire to serve the mission and deliver better care for patients, to the full extent of the available technologies.
Learn more about HPE VDI solutions and how they help you ensure business continuity and secure, safe productivity across the hybrid workplace.
HPE offers medical records delivered as a service – learn how you can run your Epic workloads with HPE GreenLake
Contact me on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aapsite/
Aivars Apsite
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Aivars_Apsite
Aivars Apsite has worked in the IT field for well over 30 years; the last 20 have been in a variety of IT leadership and IT consultative roles. Aivars is passionate about implementing technology solutions that are designed to meet the healthcare needs of the communities that health systems serve. He lives in Michigan with his wife, where both enjoy the outdoors and walks along the Lake Michigan shoreline.
