Easy, secure and instant access to any hospital system or information resource can go a long way towards helping healthcare organisations to save the lives of their patients, while simultaneously reducing costs, meeting demands for higher quality care, streamlining operations and complying with government regulations.
So says Vincent De Lucia, Citrix product manager at independent IT solutions provider First Technology, who points out that today`s patients have high expectations of service quality and a shrinking tolerance for medical errors. Healthcare providers also face stiff legal requirements regarding the security of clinical records.
To meet these complex needs, De Lucia says healthcare provider IT departments must supply professional medical staff with quick and easy access to real-time information at the point-of-care, while keeping all applications current and patient records secure. And, all of this has to be accomplished in the face of staffing shortages and limited budgets.
"Citrix solutions in healthcare provide an access infrastructure for cost-effectively deploying, managing and providing secure, ubiquitous access to administrative and clinical applications.
"These applications can be deployed, upgraded and managed from a central location. Instead of taking two weeks to configure every PC, laptop or wireless device in the hospital or clinic, IT staff can quickly install applications just once on a centralised server and make them immediately available to users across the organisation," he explains.
Applications from multiple departments can be integrated into the hospital intranet and even Web-enabled for delivery via a standard browser with no change in interface or loss of performance or security compromise. "With Citrix, any healthcare organisation can become an on-demand enterprise," he says.
"On-demand access to applications and information, using a thin-client environment, allows the entire service delivery network - from nurses to physicians and lab staff - to work more productively, make better decisions and serve patients quicker from any location. That`s because Citrix ensures applications and information are cost-effectively managed and supported on scalable, centralised servers, and delivered to users on any type of device or network connection, including wireless and low-bandwidth," he explains.
"It also gives medical professionals who divide their time between a hospital and several clinics the ability to review patient orders from the nursing station, X-ray images from radiology and blood test results from the laboratory - regardless of where they are at the time. The ability to secure off-site access to clinical systems has become critical to attracting and retaining high calibre staff," he adds.
"Citrix is addressing the need for highly efficient, safe, reliable access to applications running on any system within an organisation`s IT infrastructure from any device and over any network without having to rewrite those applications.
"This will benefit healthcare organisations as Citrix solutions deliver a competitive advantage by enabling rapid deployment and upgrading of applications, supporting the implementation of a secure, remote access environment under a centrally managed application support structure, and leveraging the Web for increased internal and external collaboration," he concludes.
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First Technology is one of SA`s largest, independent IT solutions providers, offering customers solutions and services that maximise business productivity, reduce the risk associated with deploying new technologies and minimise the total cost of IT ownership. The company has fully-fledged branches in every major business node across SA and maintains one of the largest teams of highly skilled technical personnel in the country.
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