VMware, Inc. the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud announced that healthcare providers are using VMware View to furnish medical staff with reliable access to their desktops, applications and information as they roam from room to room and floor to floor within hospitals to care for patients. Healthcare organizations including Norton Healthcare, St. Vincent’s Catholic Hospital and Riverside HealthCare are using VMware View to help deliver cost-effective, flexible, highly available IT services, ultimately improving patient care. Healthcare provider “follow me” desktops deliver the medical information they need to care for patients, while giving IT staff the ability to easily provision, secure and manage desktops and applications from the datacenter.

VMware View lets businesses run virtual desktops in the datacenter which are then accessed using thick or thin clients. End users see a familiar desktop environment with all their productivity and clinical applications available in a single view. In healthcare environments, where minutes or seconds can make a difference in patient care, it is crucial for staff to be able to quickly and reliably access medical information. VMware View enables healthcare organizations to host virtual desktops on servers in a central location, protecting valuable medical information, while providing secure, mobile desktop environments for medical staff as they care for patients throughout a hospital. Administrators also benefit from being able to manage, provision and update desktops from a central location saving valuable time and resources.

Norton Healthcare Gains Increased Flexibility and Improved Support with VMware View
Norton Healthcare is the largest health care system in the Louisville, Kentucky region with nearly 10,000 employees and a network of five hospitals and eleven immediate care centers. With nearly 950 virtual desktops deployed, Norton uses VMware View to better service their practitioners at all locations by providing a flexible and reliable desktop model with a single view of all their applications and data in a familiar, personalized environment on any device at any location.

“With VMware View™, our physicians can go to a thin client, login, access a patient list and then walk down the hall to another thin client, and their patient list would be right where they left it,” said Brian Cox, director of customer service for Norton Healthcare. “The staff recognized the benefit of that capability immediately. The moment we switched over to VMware View™, the staff stopped calling us with support issues related to their access to clinical applications being disrupted or disconnected. The overall response was great.”

Additionally, VMware View helps Norton to streamline previously time-consuming tasks like application upgrades. “We have all the virtual machines on the backend, so we can easily push out new software,” said Cox. “Application upgrades are non-events now. Recently, we upgraded one of our main applications—Meditech—and received zero helpdesk calls for the virtual desktops. Everything just runs so much more smoothly with VMware View.”

St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center Saves Money and Power with VMware View
St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center is one of New York’s most respected healthcare providers. The St. Vincent system treats nearly 150,000 patients each year and is anchored by St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan, which also serves as the academic medical center for New York Medical College. With VMware virtualization platform, the renowned healthcare system virtualized 85 percent of its infrastructure and retired 185 servers in 90 days.

“Implementing our EMR solution required us to refresh our existing desktops so could address the demand for new applications and functions,” said Tony Antinori, vice president of technology and operations, St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center. “We took this opportunity to re-evaluate our current solution and look at alternatives that could save us money, help the environment and satisfy the need for a more flexible and accessible model for our clinicians.”

“With VMware View™, we are able to move to a ‘zero footprint’ device, reduce power consumption and provide our emergency staff department an always on and available desktop,” said Kane Edupuganti, director, IT operations and communications, St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center. “We plan on continuing desktop virtualization across nearly 5,000 endpoints in order to maximize ROI in areas outside of IT.”

Riverside Medical Center Gains Improved Mobility with VMware View
A nationally recognized and award-winning hospital with leading programs in heart care, cancer care, neurosurgery and orthopedics, Riverside Medical Center serves nine communities throughout suburban Chicago. Riverside has 17 different locations and two medical campuses and has been successfully using VMware virtual desktops for throughout their organization for over two years.

“Riverside originally decided to move to a virtual desktop solution to avoid an upcoming desktop hardware refresh and to help roll out new applications,” said Wayne Kelsheimer, corporate director, Information Services at Riverside Medical Center. The VMware solution allowed us to centralize our desktop operations and maximize our IT resources. We can provision a desktop in less than 15 minutes without having to be onsite. Our nurses are able to go up to any workstation or mobile medical cart and get their same desktop on any device. We were also able to re-purpose some of our existing desktop devices into thin clients, leveraging the investments we had already made in this equipment.”

VMware View 3.1 Streamlines Workflow, Offers Localization in German and Japanese
The latest version, VMware View™ 3.1, now generally available, delivers a client information feature that helps administrators track the location of the access device and location of the caregiver so they can set policies to help streamline processes and workflow. VMware View 3.1 also includes localization in German and Japanese and increased scalability with the ability to accommodate the requirements of organizations with a larger number of VMware View users.