Desktop Layering Expands Into Healthcare as OhioHealth Selects Unidesk for 1,000 User VDI Project

It’s exciting when a trickle starts to become a trend. In December we announced that Morehead Memorial Hospital selected Unidesk to simplify and expand its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Today, we announced OhioHealth has selected Unidesk as the provisioning and management foundation for its 1,000 user VDI initiative.

OhioHealth is a big name in healthcare. They’ve been named to FORTUNE magazine’s 2012 list of the nation’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” for six consecutive years and by Thomson Reuters as one of the 10 best healthcare systems in America for three straight years. They’re known for progressively using technology to improve the quality of patient care, and they’re considered trendsetters by their healthcare peers. So why did they choose to implement VDI and Unidesk?

Why VDI

There are lots of reasons why VDI makes sense for healthcare organizations, but here are the 2 biggest cited by OhioHealth:

#1 – Ubiquitous Application Access. By replacing physical PCs with hosted virtual desktops that can be accessed anytime from any device, OhioHealth aims to make its core applications more accessible, even by physicians who are constantly on the move. As Scott Walker, Director of Technology Services at OhioHealth, told me: “The key to standard, high-quality healthcare is to get physicians to make more consistent use of computer systems. So our desktops need to better suit their mobile work requirements. VDI will enable us to offer desktops that follow clinicians wherever they go, and enable them to immediately pick up where they left off, whether they’re accessing their desktops from a device outside a patient room, their office PC, a thin client in one of our floater offices, or even when away from the office.”

#2 – Compliance. The movement of desktops (and all of their local data) from the edge to the data center will improve security and facilitate compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Furthermore, enabling physicians to consistently use desktops as the gateway to key healthcare apps will streamline the process of entering medical information. This in turn will result in more predictable, consistent healthcare and compliance with meaningful use legislation.

Why Unidesk

In Scott’s words, “Unidesk is the management solution that will make VDI work for all of our employees and more importantly for our IS organization.” Here are 3 specifics:

#1 – Simpler Application Delivery. Unidesk layering is the easiest way to deliver applications in VDI, a critical requirement in healthcare where many applications are not easily virtualized (see my recent blog on another healthcare customer’s experience trying to virtualize Dragon Naturally Speaking), and desktops are configured with many different applications and settings. Unidesk will enable OhioHealth to centrally package its large portfolio of clinical applications at a rate many IT administrators estimate is at least 10 times faster than using traditional application virtualization tools. As Scott said, “It’s just not possible to virtualize every app. We started down that path early in our VDI project, but the ROI became a challenge when it took days to package some of the more complex, legacy applications. One of the things we love about Unidesk is that the process of packaging an app is as close to a physical PC as you can get, which enables us to leverage our existing skillsets.”

#2 – Faster Desktop Provisioning and Patching. Unidesk layering technology extends beyond applications to operating system (OS) gold images and user personalization as well, enabling administrators to create custom desktops that meet any end user’s needs with one solution. Scott told us, “Beyond helping us realize the mobility and security benefits of VDI, Unidesk will address our other big pain point, which is how to make the provisioning and management of our apps and desktops better. Backing out a Windows hot fix on one physical PC is hard, never mind a thousand. But with Unidesk, we can just revert back to an earlier OS layer version at the click of a button. This alone sells the VDI model.”

#3 – Storage Efficiency. Because Unidesk can share the same Windows OS layer and common application layers across many desktops, VDI storage capacity requirements are reduced up to 70%.

OhioHealth also valued Unidesk’s tight integration with VMware View and VMware vSphere, the key desktop brokering/access and virtualization infrastructure components of its VDI project.

As we continue Unidesk’s launch into healthcare, we’ll be sharing more HC customer stories with you. Keep an eye out for an upcoming webinar featuring Scott, where he’ll provide a progress report on OhioHealth’s VDI project.