Patient Data on the Go
PALO ALTO, Calif. — The health care industry is in the midst of the single fastest transformation of any industry in history, according to Tisa Murdock, director of EUC Healthcare Solutions.
The industry’s move to electronic medical records, the increase of health care mergers and acquisitions, and migration to Windows 7 has driven major changes in patient care and how physicians are accessing patient data.
“All of these factors combined have really caused the industry to rethink the way they provide access to patient care applications and patient data,” Murdock said.
In the Healthcare Informatics webinar “Secure, Rapid Access to Point-of-Care Patient Data”, health care IT experts discussed current challenges to the health care industry and how new solutions are changing the industry.
End users of point of care solutions are seeking access to patient data that is constantly available, mobile and secure, Murdock said.
“If you look at the end users of these solutions — the physicians, the clinicians, the nurses — a lot of the time they drive change in the organization,” Murdock said. “This group of users doesn’t really care what the technology is; all they care about is that it works when and where they need it to work. They really have no tolerance for down time.”
Physicians want to have the capability to access information from outside of the hospital, from home and through any mobile device of their choosing, Murdock said. This flexibility gives physicians a better quality of life through anywhere, anytime access to patient data.
“VMWare’s vision for health care is that we want to be able to provide a native application experience regardless of what device the clinician wants to use. We want to be able to give them anytime, anywhere access to all their patient care applications and their patient data,” Murdock said. “We started delivering on this vision with the release of the Horizon Suite, which we brought to market earlier this year.”
VMWare Horizon Suite gives physicians immediate access to any tool that a physician may need to treat their patients.
The solution also relieves the enormous pressures on IT in that huge consequences can arise if a physician cannot access patient information on a desktop, Murdock said. Horizon Suite allows physicians to move from device to device for fast access to patient information in a fast-paced work environment.
However, Horizon Suite did not offer the desired availability. VMWare and Dell then created the reference design AlwaysOn Point of Care Solution. The highly available platform of the design provides constant replication and continuous data to patient care records and patient care applications.
Dan O’Farrell, senior director of product marketing with Dell Cloud Client Computing said that in order to succeed in providing data, a complete platform of cloud, management, virtualization and clients is needed.
Because each health care organization has its own unique needs, Dell provides either all of its solutions or some of its solutions to help complete a facility’s platform.
“The beauty of what Dell offers is that you can either purchase some or a little bit, whatever you need to fill the gaps to make sure you have a killer end-to-end virtual desktop architecture,” O’Farrell said.
Dell offers cost-effective, high-performance solutions with a variety of endpoints to accommodate the diverse population of end users in the health care industry, O’Farrell said.
“No one-size-fits-all in terms of what an organization needs or what a specific type of user requires,” he said.