This blog was written by Chhandomay Mandal, Solutions Marketing Director for XtremIO
VDI with XtremIO is a win-win proposition for both the end-users and the IT organizations across the industries. Earlier I highlighted customer perspectives on virtualizing graphics workstations for engineering and visualization applications. Let’s focus on healthcare today.
Last time I went to see my doctor, I noticed he came in with the paper version of my medical records. Even though he is in the business for a long time, he is relatively tech-savvy, and I have seen him with a slick tablet in my earlier visits. Out of curiosity, I asked him what happened.
Apparently the IT team is “having issues.” The applications are taking long time to start and aren’t very responsive, so he has resorted to visiting patients with paper records and updating them electronically at the end of the day when the “computers seem to run somewhat better.”
Hmmm… I started wondering how their EMR system is architected and how they are providing end-point access. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the time and place for me to strike that conversation with the doc.
Have you ever noticed something along similar lines? Frustrated doctors and nurses with their IT access, or their front office telling you that their “computers are running slow today.” I bet you have, it is fairly common.
Recently, industry analyst George Crump from Storage Switzerland sat down with the IT team of one of the largest healthcare providers in southern United States to discuss how they are solving the fast access to patient data problem.
The technical jargon for this in healthcare is “time to chart” – the amount of time that the nurse or doctor has to wait on their end-point for the EMR platform to pull up the patient’s treatment information. I guess it was hitting upwards of one minute for my doctor before he bailed. For this large healthcare provider in the south, it was nearly 45 seconds for their VDI implementation. Needless to say, doctors and nurses resisted the use of the VDI deployment that the IT team rolled out there.
The other problem is that their primary image for VDI desktops has nearly 40 applications and they need to update it frequently. The recompose operation for their VDI desktops was taking 16 hours to complete. Ooops!
One of the IT admins there learned about XtremIO at an industry tradeshow and saw a demo. After some initial PoCs, the IT team moved their VDI storage platform to XtremIO.
I’ll let you get the details about how they re-architected their VDI solution with XtremIO from his case study, but let me highlight couple of transformational results that this healthcare provider was able to achieve.
Their “time to chart” came down to 3 seconds from 45 seconds. So, the savings in time was approximately 80 minutes daily for a doctor visiting 40 patients per day. It was even more profound for nurses, who saw higher number of patients per day. Multiply that by the hundreds of doctors and nurses at the hospital, you get the picture.
And the VDI desktop recompose time? 30 seconds (vs. 16 hours previously)! I’m not even trying to put that in % improvements. J
Get the details from the Storage Switzerland analyst case study. You can learn more about how XtremIO is transforming desktop virtualization from the webinar below, as well as from our website.
Epilogue: Later I did follow-up with my doctor about their “IT problems.” That story is coming soon. Stay tuned!
