Thin Clients, Zero Clients, Tablets, Ultra-thin Laptops and Healthcare BYOD

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1 Thin Clients, Zero Clients, Tablets, Ultra-thin Laptops and Healthcare BYOD Can Consumerization Fit Healthcare IT s Demanding Requirements? Written by Greg Shields, founding partner, Concentrated Technology, LLC Introduction You ve often heard this: There s IT, and then there s healthcare IT. No other industry approaches the demanding requirements on applications, security and data access like healthcare s organized chaos. Add to that chaos the nature of the industry. Unlike in virtually every other industry, when healthcare IT fails, patient lives hang in the balance. Failures can be caused by classic service outages, but they can also be due to issues as simple as logon performance or application slowdowns. With patient records digitized inside EMR applications, a simple network hiccup during a Code Blue incident can mean the difference between life and death. As a result, healthcare IT has been forced to ride the line between bleeding-edge technology implementer and cautious maintainer of ancient-but-functioning equipment. Look at trends in other industries, though, and you ll see big shifts in how applications get delivered to users. The traditional desktop computer is being replaced by thin clients, zero clients, tablets and ultra-thin laptops, among others. Ownership of that equipment is also changing: the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) movement professes to offer improved data access without diminished security. But can this consumerization trend work for healthcare IT as well? Can BYOD s lofty goals of compute anywhere, on anything work when combined with healthcare s demanding requirements? And, most importantly, with so many types of devices now available, what is a smart technology strategy? Illuminating possible answers to these questions is one reason for the document you re reading. While not every healthcare IT environment is the same, let s analyze this problem from the perspective of high-level requirements. Framing BYOD and consumerization s potential benefits through the lens of healthcare s most-demanding requirements might be the best approach in finding the fit for this new IT initiative.

2 Demanding requirement #1: Ubiquitous computing ( everywhere access ) Medical professions are highly mobile. A primary reason behind healthcare s excessively demanding requirements is its users. Medical professionals are a notoriously impossible user base to lock into a single location. That s because the practice of medicine is highly mobile. Hospitals are dynamic locations, spread across enormous distances. Even within a single medical office, medical professionals must constantly move between patient examination rooms. As a consequence, healthcare networks can never be a boundary. This requirement alone drives a major portion of healthcare s interest in BYOD s and consumerization s technologies: one can t lead the medical professional to technology; one must take the technology to the professional. And they require multiple devices to do their jobs. An unfortunate side effect of healthcare s increasing embrace of technology is the sheer number of devices professionals are beginning to require in order to do their job. Look around a hospital floor and you ll find nurses and physicians carrying a veritable Bat Belt of devices that are mission critical for maintaining their communication workflow. The right solution minimizes the number of devices without restricting user mobility. Consumerization offers to consolidate that experience into a far smaller list of devices. With the right technology and a well-prepared network, medical professionals can find themselves still moving from place to place but keeping in contact with people and applications through a single (or few) pieces of technology. Fewer surfaces to touch mean improved cleanliness. It also means a one-stop shop for everything an on-the-go professional requires. Healthcare professionals can perform better medicine with fewer devices. Those devices, however, must support the entire range of that individual s application and communication needs. The right delivery platform supports those needs via its remote connection to all the necessary applications. Demanding requirement #2: Context-aware computing ( The apps fit the devices. ) Not every application works on every device and in every situation. We ve all experienced the pain of trying to use a poorly fitting application. Perhaps it was a tablet app that was later ported to a phone OS, or a desktop-and-mouse application that IT delivered to tablets without considering the differences in their touch-oriented user interface. IT professionals cannot ignore the reality that not every application works atop every device. One simply cannot remote enable or desktop virtualize an application and expect that app to meet its users needs while they re out in patient care locations. The right solution uses information about the user s current situation, including factors like device type and network bandwidth, to better deliver applications. Thankfully, technologies exist today that obtain a wealth of information about the context of the user workspace. This context can include characteristics of their network connection such as latency and bandwidth. It can also include device-specific settings like type and form factor of device. Such information provides the necessary instrumentation to reconfigure the endpoint s user interface in support of the application being delivered. 2

3 The right solution ensures not only that an app is available to a device, but that the app is also best prepared for use on that device. Recognize that some of these changes may be exceptionally slight, such as adjusting the user interface of a mousebased application to better support a touch-oriented device, or downsizing an application s graphical requirements in real time to continue base functionality during a transient network shortfall. Demanding requirement #3: Universal application delivery ( Even bad apps work. ) Virtual desktops are not the answer for application delivery, but an answer among a range of potential delivery mechanisms. IT s fascination with desktop virtualization in recent years is a curious offshoot of session-based remote application technologies that have been in existence for decades. This approach in connecting users with applications started in IT s earliest green screen days with mainframes and dumb terminals. It continued with the introduction of remote desktops with Microsoft s Terminal Services and later Remote Desktop Services. IT today is beginning to realize the best fit for desktop virtualization: virtual desktops are not the answer for application delivery, but an answer among a range of potential delivery mechanisms. Each mechanism offers another approach in connecting application with user. Session virtualization, desktop virtualization, even application virtualization all offer yet another approach in hosting and presenting an EMR s (or, any app s) client interface. This realization on the part of IT is a boon for healthcare s more problematic applications those that would not in the past have been well-suited for BYOD s or consumerization s operational model. In plainer English, the demanding requirement of universal application delivery is the following: Some applications don t work well on remote session technologies like Remote Desktop Services. Others have problems with desktop virtualization. Even others simply can t be delivered via application virtualization. The delivery platform that healthcare s demanding requirements need seamlessly supports connecting users to applications via the array of possible mechanisms. Users, irrespective of device, are seamlessly connected to the apps they need without having to worry about the method of delivery. Apps just appear. Demanding requirement #4: Performance with extreme resolution ( The X-ray, now. ) EMR applications must deliver extremely detailed imaging data if not today, then soon. While not necessarily unique to healthcare, the fourth of our demanding requirements is notably prevalent in healthcare applications: the need for extreme resolution in certain cases. Today s EMR applications are growing far beyond their origins as text-oriented patient record databases. Modern applications now include medical imaging and even digital microscope support for consolidating the graphical elements of patient care into their digital record. Without proper protocol and application delivery platform support, these graphical applications can be hard-pressed to maintain the extreme resolution a medical professional requires as they re delivered over wireless networks. That said, improvements to both transport protocols as well as device refactoring technologies like those discussed in the previous requirement are now available 3

4 to aid such delivery even across the range of possible consumer devices that may connect. Your EMR applications might not require extreme graphical resolution today, but all signs are pointing to those needs in the indeterminate future. As the pace of medical record digitization increases, effective graphical performance requirements must make the short list for any BYODcapable delivery solution. Demanding requirement #5: Industrial-strength security ( This won t get me fired. ) Device-based computing requires careful consideration of security issues. Peek through any dozen IT trade magazines on consumerization and BYOD and you ll find a variety of opinions about the efficacy of this movement: some believe it to be the next phase in IT operations, while others believe it the current fad worth ignoring. What s certain is that healthcare s mobility requirements are making device management a mission-critical aspect of IT operations, for both consumerowned and corporate owned devices. But this shift towards device-based computing must be done with careful consideration of security. A consumerowned device will walk out of hospital walls and continue operating as a consumer device. Most corporateowned devices have a tendency to do the same, particularly as medical professionals shift their attentions between office time, patient care and medical procedures. Protocols have improved dramatically, making secure BYOD a reality. The protocols for treating consumerowned devices as external devices on external networks, even on the intranet have seen incredible investment in recent years. Protocol performance for remote control protocols like RDP, PCoIP and ICA/HDX has seen dramatic improvement, even over crowded or latent network connections. In short, one absolutely can treat BYOD devices these days as never on the LAN and still securely deliver needed applications without concerns that doing so might someday precipitate a catastrophic, resume-producing event. Seek application delivery solutions that facilitate delivery to any device over any network as its default configuration. Then highly mobile workers will never be far from the apps that drive their practice. Demanding requirement #6: Seamless operations integration ( First, do no harm. ) Current workflows cannot be disrupted. Following through with the recommendations in requirement #5 is a sixth and final suggestion: implement BYOD and/or consumerization seamlessly. The practice of medicine doesn t slow down for the needs of technology. Therefore, the creation of something new must occur in a way that does no harm to the workflows that exist. The right application delivery platform enables one to seamlessly enable device-based access to existing applications without recoding, redevelopment or massive reintegration effort. Once brought online in the data center, the best solution is one that requires little more than a connection and a user authentication at each endpoint to get professionals back to work with patients and furthering the practice of medicine. 4

5 The healthcare fit is the delivery platform. There s plenty of confusion today about where the lines of demarcation lie with consumerization and BYOD. Is this a device play, or a data center play? Is it done for security, or for cost savings? These points of confusion exist when IT professionals don t recognize that BYOD and consumerization aren t so much about the devices but the ways we connect our users to their applications. The right delivery platform facilitates that connection, whether to traditional desktop, thin client, zero client, tablet, ultra-thin laptop or the variety of other devices that now exist in healthcare environments everywhere today. Wyse vworkspace vworkspace is a desktop virtualization and application delivery solution that complements native Microsoft technologies to provide a platform that is not only simple, scalable and extremely flexible - but one that also delivers enterprise-class performance. Simple to install and use vworkspace requires no dedicated specialists for deployment and ongoing management of the infrastructure. Built on mainstream Microsoft technologies, organizations with existing experience in Remote Desktop Services (RDS), Hyper-V and System Center will find vworkspace to have a familiar structure. The vworkspace management interface is designed with the desktop professional - rather than the server professional - in mind, and is therefore geared toward those activities most common to desktop management and application delivery. End-to-end monitoring and diagnostics provide deep visibility into the complete, desktop virtualization infrastructure - all the way down the individual user experience. Simplicity, paired with a robust feature set and exceptional technical support have helped vworkspace maintain a customer satisfaction rating greater than 90%. Scalable and flexible for organizations of all sizes Whether tens of thousands of employees or five employees, vworkspace scales up and down, down and up, based on your requirements. vworkspace flexible profiles enable very granular resource assignment that can be custom tailored to each user based on seemingly endless combinations of over twenty parameters including such things as IP address, location, device type, organizational unit, day of week, time of day and many more. And with increasing interest in desktops hosted in the cloud, it s also important to note that vworkspace also supports multi-tenancy to meet the strict requirements of managed service providers. Enterprise performance Paired with Hyper-V, vworkspace enables the deployment of thousands of desktops in under an hour. Install or upgrade to a new version of Windows across all of your desktops in twenty minutes. In addition, users will enjoy a rich, like-local, experience leveraging native Microsoft RemoteFX optimized on Dell infrastructure and clients. Learn more about vworkspace Download your free vworkspace trial today! 5

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