Just in time application delivery
One of the biggest challenges we see with most of our healthcare customers is maintaining the applications once they are in place. Firmware updates,operating system patches, and application upgrades, all forcing downtime, or significant planning. Rolling updates can mitigate some of this, but it is an incredibly manual process. Adding capacity requires building a system(s), install the operating system, add the application, test, and deploy, then add this system to the patch/update cycle. No matter how skilled you are at this process it is incredibly time consuming. It isn’t a “people or process” problem so much as a technology problem.
Healthcare applications need to become more flexible. By using a just in time application delivery model, we can simplify the deployment process. Package the application once, and deploy to an entire farm of servers, want more servers, add the entitlement to that server, and the application is automatically pushed. Citrix being prevalent in healthcare application presentation creates an opportunity to improve the deployment of applications to large Citrix farms. This enables a unified approach to application packaging and delivery at the presentation layer. It then becomes about abstracting the application from the operating system much like we did when we began virtualizing servers and abstracted the operating system from the hardware.
Application Catalogs
The rise of consumer devices, smartphones, tablets and the like have lead to the expectation that applications be delivered on demand and in a self service portal. Technically proficient users are even less willing to go through the pain of application installs.
In today’s modern healthcare enterprise, application delivery is not a single tool. We are at a transition point in how applications are written, and how they are delivered. Whether it is a Software as a Service model, or a full-on desktop, healthcare providers need to have a single place to go with a unified experience across their devices and applications. Notice the incredible flexibility of the delivery methods providing a strategy, not one size fits all. Whether you are delivering a full virtual desktop, a SaaS application, or a Citrix XenApp, everything comes through the same portal with a similar look and feel.
User Environment Management
For healthcare providers, consistency is essential. Sean Kelly, MD, a practicing ED doctor at Beth Israel, talks about a doctor assessing a stroke victim, and the considerations which go into it. What would happen if the application icon was moved, how much time would that cost, how much additional brain function would be lost? “Evaluating a stroke patient in the ER is highly time dependent,” said Kelly. “In order to treat a patient with thrombolytics (“clot-buster drugs”), a clinician must rapidly access prior medical history for any contra-indications, order a CT scan to rule out bleeding and review it on PACS, consult neurology, perform an NIH stroke scale and potentially treat blood pressure or other co-morbidities”, according to Kelly. “Good technology doesn’t just save clinicians time, but also prevents cognitive disruption and contributes to patient safety and better outcomes.”
Application Monitoring
Have you had a user call and complain about an application being slow? Healthcare is fairly unique in the application space because we tend to deliver a large Electronic Health Records application with a number of attached applications surrounding it. This becomes a larger issue when we consider the infrastructure components and the application delivery method. How can we tie those events together?
Having a single source of truth for the entire application stack is critical. When we can tie in the Infrastructure, the Citrix XenApp performance data and application data, it makes the provider experience better, reduces downtime, and allows for predictable performance. Problems can be resolved before they are seen by end users through predictive analytics.
Healthcare IT is a changing space. We are continuing to make improvements, drive innovations in patient care, and in provider satisfaction. More and more technology is not just a part of healthcare, it is the critical success factor in the patient experience. From the moment the patient walks in the office, they are impacted by applications, and how we manage and provide those applications. A positive user experience leads to higher satisfaction, and improved care. By improving the experience of the existing Citrix application delivery model we can deliver a better patient experience by improving our existing environments.
from vmwarenews.de , Original Post Here
