Dell has introduced a mobile, virtual computing offering for
healthcare providers, allowing clinicians single sign-on and
session roaming capabilities on any device for applications they're
authorized to use within a facility.
The Dell Mobile Clinical Computing (MCC) solution allows secure
role-based access to applications and data from any computing
device within a hospital. The offering is configured around the
digital profile of a user, based on the user's role and location.
So, nurses and doctors can each access data and applications
they're authorized to use, while administrators can access their
authorized applications for the same devices.
MCC saves time clinicians spend each day as they make their rounds
to patient rooms and search out workstations that are equipped with
the applications they need to use, said James Coffin, VP of Dell
Healthcare and Life Sciences during a webcast to unveil the
offering.
Instead of hunting down and logging on and off of various computing
devices clinicians can "roam" and maintain applications sessions on
any device within a facility by swiping an ID badge to log back in.
Proximity detectors close down the applications 10 seconds after a
clinician stops using a device.
Dell's first MCC customer is Silver Cross Hospital, a 300-bed
facility in Joliet, Ill. The hospital helped Dell with the design,
said Silver Cross CIO David Hillenmeyer. The computing option will
play a key role in a new "patient-centric, bedside model" hospital
that Silver Cross will open in early 2012, he said. The new
hospital will have clinicians providing treatments and entering
patient data at patients' bedsides.
The "real bonus" in the move to virtual desktops has been in
freeing up clinicians to provide "extra time with patients," said
Hillenmeyer. Before, log-ins took a minute or longer each time a
clinician moved to another patient room, application or device.
Now, it takes "seconds" to resume computing sessions, he said.
Not only are MCC's 1,000 clinicians saving about an hour day with
the simplified access, but the time it takes for Silver Cross's IT
team to update applications have also been reduced from hours to
minutes, said Bill Bisch, Silver Cross director of technical
services. "This gives us time for more innovative projects," such
as work related to the opening of Silver Cross' new hospital in the
first quarter of 2012, he said.
MCC pricing varies with the size of hospital, configuration and
other details. A hosted or private cloud based MCC configuration is
also available through Dell Services, formally Perot Systems.
While Dell is the latest, it isn't the only vendor selling virtual
desktop, single sign-on offerings to healthcare organizations.
Other vendors include Sychron and Novell.