With new regulations, requirements, and changes incessantly complicating the healthcare IT environment, clinicians can easily get caught up. As an IT leader, there's a deep-rooted risk in asking clinicians to leap through more hoops so as to satisfy another federal initiative, like Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE).
At Kootenai Health, our strategy before CPOE go-live was to proactively implement time-saving technologies that might offset the new demands: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Single check in (VDI and SSO).
In some ways, this was a clean win. VDI and SSO allow doctors to quickly “tap” in and out of workstations with a swipe of their encoded badge. For every clinical user, VDI/SSO is estimated to save lots of five hours per month related to loading and login time. It didn’t take long in the least for users at Kootenai Health to ascertain that new methods and technologies could support their natural workflows and ultimately save them time.
In the first month alone, VDI and SSO automated quite 250,000 application logins at Kootenai Health. This resulted in significant time savings, allowing the clinicians to spend longer that specialize in their top priority: patient care. Estimated productivity savings for the primary year after implementation were approximately $1.5M and ongoing annualized savings are approximately $1.8M.
VDI and SSO add up on all levels. Not only does this technology support the fluid clinical experience, it also results in significant productivity savings, enhanced security, space efficiency, hardware savings, efficient desktop management, and simplified back-end support.
From a security standpoint, the results of our VDI/ SSO implementation are completely positive. In traditional, distributed computing situations, clinicians sometimes use generic login credentials, leave stations logged in unattended, or forget sensitive papers on the printer.