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Mobile Work Environment Poses Unique Challenges to Healthcare Organizations

By Emanuel Pirker, founder and CEO, Stratodesk

A unique set of challenges influence healthcare IT - from the increasing mobility of healthcare workers to the protection of and access to sensitive patient information.

While healthcare providers continually move around the hospital, they need immediate, secure access to apps and data.

However, strict laws, policies, and procedures govern the storage and accessibility of confidential patient data. Likewise, enabling secure identity authentication when prescribing and dispensing medicine makes issues more complex.

To combat the rising demands placed on IT, IT leaders are leveraging a powerful combination of end-user computing (EUC) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can help solve the challenges inherent to this shift in healthcare. At the same time innovative IT solutions can save money for healthcare IT and improve patient experience.

VDI - the Prescription for Ailing Healthcare IT

VDI proves to be a tried-and-true solution for the new and emerging challenges posed by an increasingly mobile healthcare work world. VDI is how healthcare IT staff can more efficiently manage the vast array of endpoints that make up the healthcare IT web. There are four areas of focus for healthcare IT - ensuring compliance, repurposing outdated hardware (endpoints), easing application updates and matching licensing requirements, all through a centralized management approach.

  • VDI, healthcare and compliance: many regulations govern how patient data can be stored and accessed throughout and without the hospital. VDI can help make coming into compliance that much easier thanks to its unique, added security layer.
  • Get rid of the management nightmare: IT leaders use VDI to manage their endpoint deployments more easily. Endpoint devices access virtual desktops that can be configured within the data center or cloud.
  • Repurposing endpoints: Because the endpoints themselves are not doing the heavy lifting, IT can leverage existing devices, old and new.
  • Easing licensing requirements: VDI makes it easier for IT to make sure all software licenses are up to date and in compliance with both internal and external policies.

The Pandemic - A Lens into the Promise of VDI for Healthcare IT

Now more than ever, PC conversion is a vitally important aspect of endpoint strategy. The pandemic disrupted supply chains, which drove up prices for already expensive new devices. PC Conversion was once a nice way for healthcare providers to reduce capital investments in new hardware. Today it is essential to budget preservation and ensuring high levels of employee productivity across the entire organization.

PC Conversion effectively turns outdated devices into healthy and technologically sound endpoints.

Productivity Extends Beyond the Office

Take the case of the near-overnight explosion of COVID-19 clinics and test sites and the herculean task asked of healthcare IT to enable seamless and secure access to endpoints at these remote testing sites.

This seemingly insurmountable obstacle of providing the right device, at the right place, for the right worker was made possible because of the cloud, VDI, and PC Conversion.

The Future of VDI in Healthcare Settings

We expect the demand for hybrid work scenarios like these listed above to continue to drive the demand and need for effective VDI and EUC deployments. Endpoint deployments in healthcare will continue to become more diverse, both in regard to the actual device form factors being leveraged, and to the location of those endpoints, and the mixture of various third-party integrations within a secure endpoint strategy.

Raspberry Pis, Intel NUCs, personal devices, and even underperforming, cheap laptops that now must be converted in order to deliver seamless video collaboration in telehealth and power advanced software are all being leveraged to power modern, mobile patient care.

While healthcare IT has never been so complex, it has likewise never had so much incredible potential to succeed thanks to the powerful combination of modern VDI, cloud, and end-user computing solutions becoming more accessible than ever before.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emanuel Pirker 

Emanuel Pirker, founder and CEO, Stratodesk: A Silicon Valley veteran, Pirker has over 20 years of technology and entrepreneurial leadership experience, including 15 years of desktop virtualization expertise. Pirker strives to build enterprise-ready products that deliver value to customers while changing the way users interact with technology.

Published Monday, March 21, 2022 8:17 AM by David Marshall
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