Mater Health Services has implemented an end-to-end virtualisation solution from Citrix Solutions to provide quicker and more reliable access to electronic medical records, business applications and patient data for its healthcare practitioners.

Queensland-based Mater Health Services, a not-for-profit provider of healthcare services, will implement Citrix XenDesktop, XenServer and NetScaler enabling its clinicians to work more effectively anywhere, any time and on any device.

The Citrix XenDesktop also assists in addressing specific healthcare sector device compliance and regulatory requirements.  Standard PCs are unsuitable for use in intensive care areas such as the neo-natal ward, operating theatres and “cardiac protected electrical areas” due to their high current leakage and so, as a result, clients running XenDesktop were a cost effective compliant solution.

Prior to deploying Citrix, Mater had trialled other desktop virtualisation solutions for eighteen months, however during this time Mater experienced several challenges with accessing and viewing high resolution patient images across its network of hospitals.

According to Peter Nomikos, Director of IT Services at Mater, another key driver for choosing Citrix XenDesktop was the ability for medical practitioners to remotely review high resolution patient scans and videos, which is essential for accurate patient diagnosis.

“With a typical patient CT or MRI scan requiring up to 4000 images, it was critical to have a solution that could guarantee high resolution images and video delivery for emergency after hour’s diagnosis.”

“Mater provides care for over half a million patients each year across different hospitals, so we needed to provide our staff with access to electronic health information across all sites. Citrix’s virtualisation technology has been invaluable in enabling clinicians to quickly sign in to any thin client and quickly access the information they need.”

Citrix XenDesktop was initially deployed to 85 thin clients at the end of 2010, while a gradual rollout of between 2,000 to 2,500 thin clients across all sites commenced in March 2011. Mater Health Services also uses XenServer, Citrix’s server virtualisation offering, to host the Xendesktop workloads and NetScaler appliances to optimise application availability for users and provide a full desktop experience for remote access.

Mater is currently evaluating its mobile device strategy and is trialling remote access to tablet devices such as the iPad to its clinicians. In addition, Mater plans to improve care by using desktop virtualisation to transform bedside patient entertainment screens for use with medical applications. This will enable healthcare practitioners to better engage patients in their care at the bedside.