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.
