A hospital emergency room can be a whirlwind of activity. From heart attacks to domestic disturbances to gunshot wounds to psychiatric-related cases, the doctors and nurses who staff these ERs round-the-clock pretty much see it all.

St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center in New York is no exception. And with 42 facilities in five boroughs, keeping track of the incoming patient information and updating it in real time became a logistical challenge. Health care teams need to monitor cases as they quickly transition from the waiting room to the operating room to the hospital bed and, finally, departure and follow-up visits. With only eight desktop engineers serving 7,000 users, the hospitals’ shared-bandwidth MPLS network couldn’t keep up with doctors, nurses and technicians trying to access records via bedside PCs and other hardware.

So its IT department came up with a novel solution: It tossed out the PCs.

Committing to a massive virtualization project, IT staff then installed a remote access system that housed patient records on a main server and let doctors, nurses and technicians connect from anywhere on the network using a desktop virtualization solution from Menlo Park, Calif.-based Pano Logic. Pano Logic provided both the software and a small, end-user device commonly called a “zero client.” (The name refers to the fact that the device contains none of the processing power or equipment of a PC.) The zero client has no CPU or storage or anything else that would require maintenance. It has no embedded operating system or firmware, no device drivers or other software, no local storage or moving parts.

It simply and securely connects the attached keyboard, mouse, display, audio and USB peripherals over a local area network to the Pano Direct Service running within a Microsoft Windows XP desktop virtual machine. And because the Pano Device is 100 percent hardware, all software—including the virtualized Windows operating system, applications and drivers—is centralized in the data center, where it can be most efficiently managed, supported and protected.

It only takes 30 minutes to deploy a new Pano device, as opposed to 4 hours for a desktop PC, and the devices use just over 3/100s of the wattage power that the PCs needed. Endpoint management is eliminated because all processing and software operations are moved to the data center. Time-consuming "troubleshooting" trips on the part of computer engineers to remote sites are eliminated.

More than 600 devices will be installed this year, as the system is being rolled out in radiology, cardiology and other departments throughout St. Vincent’s network.