Behavioral health disorders including drug addiction and alcoholism affect over 20 million people in the United States. Addiction treatment centers ensure a long-term chance at sobriety by providing high-quality inpatient and outpatient drug and alcohol addiction treatment and counseling services. The Watershed in Delray Beach, Florida, a leading drug addiction treatment provider that employs more than 600 personnel across five inpatient and partial hospitalization facilities in Florida and Texas, depends on Citrix virtual desktops, networking and VoIP applications to make it easier for staff to help patients.

Citrix Workspace Suite with NetScaler ADC and NetScaler SD-WAN has revolutionized the workday for healthcare staff by giving them greater mobility and quicker access to crucial patient data, whether they choose to work from home or one of the office locations. By reducing the time needed to enter essential information into systems, staff are better able to care for patients and in a timelier manner. For example, Citrix solutions have addressed one of the most common frustrations in healthcare by reducing the login time on a shared desktop workstation from roughly two minutes to 15 seconds for the initial login, and only five seconds for every login thereafter. This equates to having more time to help patients, a huge value to both healthcare staff and patients.

A primary example takes place at the Admissions Suite in the Florida facility where there are many employees involved in the initial admission of a patient who is often in distress. The following describes a common scenario for quickly and calmly admitting the patient into the facility within the first hour of arrival with all staff using the same desktop:

1. A paramedic walks in with the patient, enters patient basic stats into the system
2. A nurse takes the patient’s vital signs and basic health information
3. The patient advocate reviews financial counseling guidelines and patient rights

Citrix solutions deliver the secure access that is different for each staff role accessing their account from the shared desktop, and still cuts the login time dramatically, simplifying the admission process for a troubled patient.

While there are many benefits to patients, the day-to-day benefits to staff of The Watershed are numerable as well. The Watershed needed a way to securely and cost-effectively maintain connections for all its medical personnel such as doctors and nurses, as well as employees in its call centers. The Watershed chose Citrix solutions for secure, always-on connectivity for all employees in every location. This comprehensive Citrix networking solution allowed The Watershed to centralize patient and administrative data and leverage new applications to improve overall patient care. Further, the company can now make updates to its remote facilities from its Florida headquarters with no issues, while the NetScaler SD-WAN platform enables The Watershed to proactively monitor the health and performance of application delivery across its WAN. This further allows for location-agnostic access for employees, which was previously a barrier. Now employees truly feel the freedom to embrace mobility and work from anywhere, whether it’s a home or another office location, because they trust that they can securely and consistently access crucial patient data.