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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – New Apple devices always get a lot of buzz—they give you new ways to enjoy digital media and connect with friends, not to mention the cool factor—but it’s not often that they deliver a major impact on the way healthcare is provided. But that’s just what the iPad is going to do (with a little help from Citrix). Before long, we’ll see iPads in the hands of medical professionals everywhere—clinics, hospitals, and doctors’ offices—and we’ll be glad when we do. Because in simple terms, the iPad will make it easier for medical professionals to give better care, faster, while reducing costs at the same time.
Why will the iPad make such a difference for healthcare? Consider the way medical professionals have worked without it. Today, doctors and nurses typically access patients’ electronic health records, information on diseases and their treatments, and other data using PCs or thin clients in one of two places: installed at nurses’ stations or doctors’ offices, or on rolling health stations that travel from room to room. Given the need to deliver treatment quickly and efficiently, this scenario poses obvious drawbacks. Constrained by cost and available floor space, a medical facility can install only so many terminals, and care providers often find the one closest to them in use when they need it. Carts are expensive and cumbersome, and never seem to be around when they’re needed. Outside the hospital or medical office, the barriers to information are even higher, becoming especially problematic when a doctor gets a call about a patient and needs to make a decision or recommendation without having access to the patient’s records.
Many doctors seeking a better way to work have already embraced the iPhone as a way to access medical records, information, and applications. It’s a major improvement in terms of portability and convenience. Developers have already produced native iPhone apps like Epocrates, which lists every known drug in a regularly updated database, complete with recommended dosages, interactions, complications and an image of the drug itself. Still, the iPhone is at best only a partial solution. For one thing, the small screen size limits its usefulness for applications requiring a lot of real estate, such as those with detailed data or more intensive functionality. And so, the search continues.
Mobilizing Access—Not Data
At first glance, the iPad looks like the solution healthcare professionals have been looking for. It’s got everything they like about the iPhone—convenience, portability, 3G (said to be available late April) and Wi-Fi connectivity, the same familiar iPhone OS operating system—but with a bigger screen that provides plenty of room for apps. It’s also a lot lighter and cheaper than a PC-based tablet.
But it’s still not perfect. While there are many useful medical applications available, there aren’t nearly enough, and far from the full set required for a true terminal replacement. New apps are being written every day, but any solution that depends on developers to re-code their work for another operating system will always slow time-to-market and limit users’ options. For the iPad to fully meet the needs of healthcare providers, it would need to be able to support applications written for any operating system—not just the iPhone OS.
Even if every medical app under the sun were already available for the iPad, another problem would remain: security. Patient data is highly sensitive, governed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and having it reside anywhere outside the hospital’s data center—on an iPad, a PC, or anywhere else—is highly risky. Thus, another challenge: how to make data accessible from any location—while making sure that the data itself never actually leaves the data center?
Fortunately, solutions for these problems are already available. In fact, a single technology can solve both: desktop virtualization.
In a virtualized environment, applications or entire user desktops are abstracted from the underlying hardware. Instead of installing software and storing data on a PC or another end user device, both applications and data remain within the data center and are accessed remotely. In one common virtualization scenario, the only things that actually travel through the network are the user’s keystrokes and mouse actions in one direction, and the resulting screen to be displayed in return.
Technical details aside, here’s what really matters about virtualization: because applications actually run within the data center, not on the end user device, it doesn’t matter what kind of device runs what kind of app. An iPad can run any Windows app, and the data itself stays in the data center at all times, protected by its security.
Virtualization isn’t just a theory; it has been one of the biggest trends in enterprise technology over the past few years, and most major companies have already used products like Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop to virtualize applications, user desktops, and even their entire user environment.
In fact, most hospitals already use virtualization solutions like Citrix XenApp to deliver virtualized electronic healthcare applications to thin clients and PCs at nurse stations and on carts. As a result, they’ve already done most of the work; all that remains is to add iPads to their existing Citrix infrastructure. There’s even a new Citrix Receiver for iPad available to help them do exactly that.
What iPad + Citrix Means to Medical Professionals
“Making the rounds” is about to become a far more convenient prospect for doctors. As she goes from bed to bed, a doctor uses it to pull the records and chart for each patient she sees. She notes his progress, checks the dosage recommendations for a new medication, updates his prescription, and generates follow-up instructions for both the duty nurse and the patient himself—all without having to seek out an available computer terminal. (Note to lab coat makers: add a little space in the side pocket and call it iPad compatible!)
A nurse carries an iPad of her own as she makes her rounds. She uses it to check each patient’s chart, note their vital signs and the medications they’ve been administered, and logs her observations. Never having to push carts or wait her turn at the nurse’s station, she’s able to complete these tasks quickly and efficiently to devote more time to patient comfort (and even manage a quick meal for herself now and then).
After hours, a doctor gets a call at home. Without even setting foot in his home office, he pulls the patient’s records, checks on a few medical references, and sends instructions to the nurse on duty. Although she used her own home WiFi to connect his iPad with the hospital’s data center, the patient’s private information has remained entirely secure, handled in full compliance with HIPAA regulations.
As medical professionals converge on industry conferences, they leave their laptops back at the office, instead using the iPad for everything from giving presentations to reading journals to managing their schedules. Connecting with colleagues elsewhere is fast and simple, enabling them to share the latest insights and developments in real-time.
A Cure for the Healthcare IT Blues
Behind the scenes, the iPad-Citrix combo solves a number of problems for healthcare administrators and IT personnel as well—and saving floor space is only the beginning.
HIPAA compliance is a major challenge for every healthcare organization, posing strict requirements for the privacy, security, portability, and accountability of patient data. As described above, in a virtualized environment, data never leaves the data center. This makes it much simpler to secure and control, and to make sure that only authorized personnel access specific information. Beyond the hospital’s own secure network, administrators can require two-factor security—for example, an additional password—to enable access through a public or third-party network. Meanwhile, a lost laptop or a hacked home computer contains no actual data, eliminating another risk vector.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) includes a provision called the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, also known as the “HITECH Act.” In essence, this measure provides funding and incentives to speed the adoption of e-health technologies while strengthening privacy and security. As healthcare organizations rush to take advantage of these incentives, mobile computing devices are a high priority for new investment. At several thousand dollars each, specialized tablet computers and carts would run through the available funds with dismaying speed. Instead, the organization can get four or five iPads for the price of a specialized tablet to achieve far more bang for their buck. Certainly there will still be environments where a custom arraignment is justified—but not for every healthcare professional and circumstance.
While the adoption of electronic medical records has received a major push in recent years, software vendors are still constrained in developing Web-based solutions, which provide deployment improvements but still have security and rich user interface challenges. Desktop virtualization provides all the benefits of a Web-based application—including centralized management and the ability to run the same app on multiple types of devices—without requiring the application itself to be rewritten. Meanwhile, security is built-in and the user interface is preserved. As a result, new technologies can be adopted more easily, faster, and more broadly, providing a boost to the entire electronics medical records sector as a whole.
At the end of the day, of course, the quality of healthcare depends largely on the skill and commitment of the professionals who deliver it. But by enabling these individuals to get the information they need, when they need it, and enhancing communication throughout the healthcare delivery chain, Citrix and the iPad will help them do their best possible work for each patient they see. And that’s good news for all of us.
http://citrix.com
Bio:
Chris Fleck is Vice President of Community and Solutions Development at Citrix Systems. Chris started his career at IBM working across multiple engineering and product organizations leading to Business Unit Exec of the IBM Industrial Computer Group. Chris founded an IBM spin-off to commercialize the initial Server Blade products as CEO of OmniCluster Technologies. At Citrix Chris is responsible for the Developer Network, solutions development, and growing the technical community around Citrix. As part of the Citrix CTO Office he is also involved with or leading multiple strategic initiatives at the company. Currently his hot topics include Mobility, VDI and Cloud Computing. You can follow him on Twitter and his blog at TechInstigator.com.
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