AveleijnSDT provides health care for children and adults with mental disorders, and offers a broad range of support and development services, especially for supervised living and daycare clinics. AveleijnSDT was created in 2008 from the merger of two foundations: Aveleijn and dagcentra Twente (SDT). The organization has more than 2,300 clients and 1,700 employees in the central part of Twente, and is currently expanding in multiple regions in the Netherlands.

The challenge: streamlining mental health processes

Five years ago, both the Aveleijn and SDT foundations used standalone PCs. Applications were not standardized and all data was kept on local hard disks. Solving IT problems was very time-consuming, because the staff had to visit each location. “We have all kinds of sites where our clients live, stay for the day, work or simply visit now and then,” said Robert Baake, IT project manager at AveleijnSDT. “With the merger and our expansion, we knew that the number of desktops would increase quickly, and more and more locations would need to be connected.   Also, we anticipated that PCs would become a very important asset for supporting combined processes. However, before healthcare processes such as reporting and communicating about clients could be streamlined, the existing desktops needed to be brought up to a certain level of quality and the software had to be standardized across the combined organization. We needed a manageable and flexible solution.”

Implementing Application Delivery Infrastructure from Citrix

The Aveleijn foundation had started using Citrix XenApp™ to deliver Microsoft® Office to subsidiaries without the need to maintain applications on local PCs. After the merger with the SDT foundation, which faced the same IT administration challenges, AveleijnSDT decided to expand and scale up the Citrix XenApp environment.

IT Oost Nederland, a Gold Citrix Solution Advisor that was already involved as the IT service provider at AveleijnSDT, designed and implemented the new infrastructure based on XenApp, Platinum Edition and Citrix Provisioning Server™ for Datacenters, together with the internal project leader. During the migration, IT Oost Nederland continuously provided instruction and educated the IT staff at AveleijnSDT.

Provisioning Server is used to stream a golden image containing the server workload – Windows Server® 2003, XenApp, Platinum Edition, and 20 applications – to 11 HP servers. Only two golden images – one for each type of server hardware – are provisioned and maintained using Provisioning Server. XenApp, Platinum Edition virtualizes and delivers the applications to end users over the network. Those users working from home connect securely to the XenApp environment using the Citrix Access Gateway™ SSL VPN, a capability provided with the Platinum Edition.

The organization now uses 650 Wyse thin clients, as well as a small number of PCs configured as thin clients running local multi-media applications such as the online “AveleijnSDT Academy.”

Enabling certification of healthcare

Employees at AveleijnSDT now have access to documents with patient information and are able to create reports wherever and whenever they need them, thanks to virtualized application delivery. In addition, they can consult information about clients’ medications.

“Implementing an application delivery infrastructure from Citrix has helped AveleijnSDT become ISO 9001 HKZ certified, which would have been almost impossible in the old situation with standalone PCs. This certification means that we have everything structured well, that we are completely customer focused and that we can present reliable reports,” continued Baake. “Previously, we sometimes lost data as a result of problems with PCs containing reports, and a lot of information was communicated verbally and written down on paper. Now the information exchange has improved drastically, communication is more efficient and the procedures are clearer. We can guide our clients and provide quality care because client information and treatments are available always and anywhere.”

Access from home increases employee efficiency

AveleijnSDT uses Citrix Access Gateway combined with SafeWord tokens for additional authentication, mainly to enable an employee to work from home with the approval of his or her manager. Access Gateway extends secure delivery of the published desktop running on XenApp — which is also delivered to all sites and the Administrative Center — to the homes of employees, who benefit from exactly the same environment as they use during business hours. This increases employees’ efficiency because they can prepare for the day and create reports outside of office hours. The infrastructure enables, for example, an orthopedagogue  (a specialist in personal development and learning) to access the desktop from the house of a client or give employees at sites that provide 24-hour services to clients access from home to Unit 4 Agresso, an application necessary to see employees’ schedules.

Supporting more locations and more desktops with the same IT staff

To be able to integrate clients into society as much as possible, AveleijnSDT operates a number of different sites ranging from houses to workshops on an industrial estate and even living rooms at the homes of clients. Baake said, “In the old situation we needed one to two days a week to visit these locations and solve problems with PCs or applications. Using thin clients at the sites and delivering virtualized applications with Citrix XenApp from the datacenter in Borne, we can address most problems by phone and more time can be spent on supporting employees with respect to content. Even though the number of sites and the demand for desktops have increased, we can support them without an increase in staff by using the centralized management capabilities of XenApp.”

In addition, maintaining the growing number of servers and keeping them identical became time-consuming and complex. Small differences between servers caused problems that were complicated to solve, so AveleijnSDT decided to consolidate the server environment. “The environment is scaled down to two golden images, maintained and provisioned with Citrix Provisioning Server to 11 HP servers. XenApp application streaming handles all end-user applications on the XenApp servers and, together with Provisioning Server, forms a very powerful administrative platform that improves the stability and consistency of our datacenter. Updates to applications and servers run quickly and smoothly, and we no longer need to maintain individual application or server settings. Thanks to the Citrix solutions, we are able to manage system and network administration, IT projects and support for over 1,700 employees with under four full-time equivalents,” Baake concluded.

AveleijnSDT recently started a pilot of single sign-on capability with Citrix Password Manager™, part of Citrix XenApp, Platinum Edition, for a few employees in the Administrative Center and expects to implement it on a large scale within the organization.

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