Blog posts tagged with 'healthcare'
If you want to hear directly from leading experts in Healthcare IT and learn more about their experiences and expertise around successful implementations of EMR solutions, then I encourage you to view on demand this 60-minute webcast.
Speaking Panel:
Mike Davis, Executive Vice President for HIMSS Analytics
Cleveland Stewart, Systems Network Engineer, The Children's Hospital of Denver
Cris Lau, Senior Product Manager for Citrix Systems
Learn about:
- EMR implementation lessons learned from hospitals that have achieved Stage 6 in HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption ModelSM
- Strategies for improving physician and staff EMR adoption
- Overcoming common obstacles around EMR adoption - such as cost, security, and deployment time
CPHIMS Credit:
Additionally, this program has been approved by HIMSS for up to 1.2 contact hours of continuing education credit towards renewal of the CPHIMS credential.
In my previous SmartAuditor blog post, I described how SmartAuditor works and its benefits for improving security and regulatory compliance. Well, guess what? Recently, a major healthcare company (obviously highly regulated by HIPAA) with tens of thousands of employees shared with me their thoughts, experiences, and main use cases regarding our SmartAuditor technology. In addition to providing care and services, this healthcare company partners with numerous nursing homes, hospitals and other healthcare organizations in the United States. The interesting part is that the more I talk to customers about SmartAuditor for recording ICA sessions, the more interesting the use cases get. So here's their success story.
Background
This customer offshore most of their development to India, had employees and non-employees accessing production systems remotely on a daily basis and wanted to monitor what they were doing, and needed to deliver custom applications in a faster way. They started using the SmartAuditor technology since it was released as a beta a little over two years ago.
The Challenges
The main challenges for this customer were:
- How to track and monitor IT change control?
- How to ensure employees comply with company policies?
- How to allow offshore developers to see user interaction with custom applications in QA and test environments?
Use Case #1: IT change control management
The customer had a lot of employees and non-employees logging in remotely to production systems on a daily basis and wanted to monitor them and ensure they were compliant (especially tracking the activity of users offshore). In order to improve security and compliance, they set up a secure portal using Citrix Access Gateway and turned on the SmartAuditor capabilities of Citrix XenApp. So by using SmartAuditor, any time a developer, employee or non-employee access the production system, all the ICA sessions are being recorded, making sure that they are keeping up with company policies.
Use Case #2: Rapid application delivery
Like most businesses, this customer has some fragile and complex applications and users that just don't get it. So instead of releasing an application into production and having users call the help desk trying to diagnose problems, this customer put SmartAuditor ahead of the process. The customer turned SmartAuditor on before the application was fully delivered into production. They took the application and released it only to their test users and generated a list with issues. Then, with the rapid playback and bookmarking capabilities of SmartAuditor, the developers very quickly diagnosed what was wrong with the application and made the changes. The main benefits the customer got out of this were that they were able to deliver the application to market quicker and that the application was clean. By doing this, they have minimized the number of help desk calls and problem resolution for this application.
The Benefits
The main benefits for this customer were:
- Enhanced auditing for improving compliance
- Encouraged employees to comply with company policies. The customer is watching and recording. People log in, get out, and stick to the script.
- Improved the quality of the application development process by visually seeing problems and accelerating time-to-resolution
- The rapid playback and bookmarking capabilities saved time. Experts were able to find the issues and solved them right away.
The Results
- Low storage requirements
- With SmartAuditor, compression over a period of time was very good. The customer has been using SmartAuditor for over 2 years. In that period of time, they recorded 8,222 sessions which only required 43GB of storage space. On average, that's a 5.2MB file size per recorded session. Wow!
- Excellent performance when recording and reviewing sessions
- Faster application delivery and better user acceptance
How are you using SmartAuditor? What has been your experience with this feature of XenApp?
You may have already seen the Tolly Group's report on how SpeedScreen Progressive Display enables delivery of PACS images to healthcare workers over a variety of network types. But for me it is even more exciting to hear from customers actually experiencing this technology in the field. Recently I learned of a hospital network using XenApp 4.5 (formerly known as Presentation Server) to deliver radiography images from their Agfa IMPAX 6.2 image and information management system. I haven't asked permission to publish the name of the customer but I can share their observations with you. Interestingly, IMPAX 6 is billed by Agfa as a web-deployable PACS system since it offers a Java plug-in for Internet Explorer, yet the hospital found that performance over their WAN is significantly better using XenApp to publish the IMPAX application (Win32). On Windows XP PCs with at least a Pentium III processor and 256 MB of RAM (the oldest production PCs still in service across the 7,000 PCs on their network), performance is "exceptional". In fact, XenApp has successfully delivered "cine loops" where a series of up to 300 splices of a CT scan is displayed at 27 frames per second -- a very challenging use case! These observations were made with the users situated 5 miles down the road from the hospital's data center, connected over a gigabit network and through a 10 Mbps switch.
Have you started using SpeedScreen Progressive Display in your business? If so, please post a comment or send me an email.
Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization
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