Located in Ontario, Canada, Hamilton Health Sciences is a family of six hospitals and a cancer center that comprise a total of 1,200 beds. The organization also provides many outpatient services and centers. Hamilton Health Sciences cares for more than 2.3 million residents and employs approximately 10,000 people.

Improving patient care and meeting the technology needs of physicians

Hamilton Health Sciences has the stated goal of increasing at-the-bedside interactions between patients and both nurses and physicians to improve care quality and accelerate decision making. The organization was also looking to accommodate requests from physicians to use tablets and other devices in its facilities. As CIO Mark Farrow explained, “Healthcare is all about mobility. Most physicians in Canada are independent businessmen. Yet, hospitals have always tried to dictate what devices they’re going to use, how they’re going to use them and where they are permitted to go. In the past, with security and privacy concerns, we basically would have just said, ‘You can’t use that device’. In this case we had physicians buying iPads, and saying, ‘I am going to use this device, what are you going to do about it?’.”

Using Citrix Receiver for app delivery to the latest devices

Hamilton relies on Citrix® XenDesktop® and Citrix® XenApp™ as the primary solutions to deliver virtual desktops and virtual applications to more than 9,000 staff and 1,500 physicians.  Citrix Receiver™, an integrated component of XenDesktop and XenApp, enables on-demand delivery of virtual desktops and Windows, web and SaaS applications to any device—including PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, tablets and smartphones.

With Citrix Receiver, Hamilton now offers access to over 60 office and medical applications as a self-service, helping IT get out of the business of managing apps on each individual endpoint.  Whether they are working at nursing stations or on mobile devices at the bedside, users can securely access critical patient information and applications. Physicians are able to download Citrix Receiver to gain access to Hamilton’s Citrix environment from whatever device they choose to bring in.  “All of a sudden I can give them a device, or they can bring in a device, that allows them the flexibility to be on the network and get what they need to get here, and then they can go off to home, or their office, and do something completely different,” added Farrow.

“Almost on day one, my security lead had Citrix Receiver loaded and running in about 10 minutes and people were off and running. We are able to say ‘yes’ to these devices, because you are on a secure piece of software. We know what you are accessing and that you are following our rules. I don’t have to worry about software leaving a footprint on your device when you disconnect. What Receiver allowed us was to become more device independent,” noted Farrow.

Fast, flexible access for physicians and staff

Physicians now have the freedom to use the iPad or choose from virtually any tablet device, smartphone and every major web browser. “Staff can access their patient lists, they can access Meditech, they can follow through on the patients at bedside, they can review the charts, and they can get on to the portal. Citrix Receiver made it a whole lot easier for people to bring a device of choice into the organization, and allow us to keep the security in place,” stated Farrow.

Farrow also sees Citrix technology as critical for positioning his organization for the future, “Healthcare right now is in a transformation stage; we really are a mobile business inside our own hospitals and clinics. By allowing clinicians to work at the bedside or anywhere else, with any device they choose, Citrix Receiver is really a game-changer. I don’t think we would have seen an iPad in our organization had it not been for Citrix Receiver. We just wouldn’t have had a use for it.”

Farrow concludes, “Today, it’s the iPad and tomorrow it could be the Dell Streak or another Android device. This new hardware is where everything is going and I think Citrix is the IT company that is perfectly positioned to actually make these consumer devices into useful business tools.”