Kindred Healthcare, Inc., a top-150 private employer in the United States, is a healthcare services company based in Louisville, Kentucky with annual revenues of $6 billion and approximately 76,900 employees in 46 states. At September 30, 2011, Kindred through its subsidiaries provided healthcare services in over 2,250 locations, including 120 long-term acute care hospitals, five inpatient rehabilitation hospitals, 224 nursing and rehabilitation centers, 23 sub-acute units, 47 hospice and home care locations, 102 inpatient rehabilitation units (hospital-based) and a contract rehabilitation services business, RehabCare, which served approximately 1,740 non-affiliated facilities. Ranked as one of Fortune magazine’s Most Admired Healthcare Companies for three years in a row, Kindred’s mission is to promote healing, provide hope, preserve dignity and produce value for each patient, resident, family member, customer, employee and shareholder we serve.

The challenge: supporting a diverse, rapidly growing organization

Kindred’s rapid growth is fueled in part by the acquisition of complementary healthcare organizations. To operate efficiently while ensuring a seamless healthcare experience as patients move among its facilities and divisions, the company must work quickly to bring these acquisitions into a unified computing environment. Most recently, Kindred faced the task of integrating RehabCare, a $1.3 billion rehabilitation company with 37 hospitals in multiple states. “One of the challenges was to provide access to 22 financial applications for about 25,000 new users on day one,” explained John Vorreiter, senior director of Technical Services at Kindred. “We had limited access to their environment ahead of time, before we actually owned them, so we couldn’t just go in and start installing systems.” Citrix desktop virtualization provided the solution.

Implementing Citrix desktop virtualization to integrate new acquisitions

For more than a decade, Kindred has used Citrix solutions to enable its workers to access corporate resources from any location in the organization. For the Rehabcare acquisition, Kindred used Citrix® XenDesktop® and Citrix® XenApp™ to deliver virtual desktops and applications to these new users so they would have all the resources they needed, from Adobe Acrobat to SAP, available immediately upon commencement of Kindred’s operational ownership. “The fact is, we don’t know of another way to bring that many users on, for that many systems, throughout an unknown environment,” said Vorreiter.

Supporting rapid business growth

The centralized control and management provided by XenDesktop and XenApp makes it simple for Kindred to give new users access to the systems their work depends on while enforcing its policies regarding how and where these resources can be used. By providing access to virtualized applications rather than actually integrating the networks of integrated companies with its own network, the company ensures that its systems remain isolated from any threats that may be present in the other environment, such as malware or outdated security patches. “During a very busy year with tremendous acquisition activity, XenDesktop and XenApp allowed Kindred to join together many organizations, large and small, with a highly responsive and flexible integration strategy while safeguarding the integrity of our core network and systems,” said Vorreiter. While enhancing agility, the Citrix solutions have helped the company maintain high operational efficiency. The entire Citrix environment is administered by a small team of four Kindred employees and three contractors.

Creating a culture of anywhere, any device access

Care providers, as well as back-office employees throughout Kindred, can now access virtual desktops on demand from any location, on any device—including their own personal smartphones and tablets—to use clinical systems such as Meditech EMR and business applications such as SAP. Said Vorreiter, “We’ve taken advantage of the widespread device support provided by Citrix Receiver to put virtualized resources in the hands of remote users via iPads, iPhones and Android-based phones, as well as Macintosh and Windows clients.

Extending value throughout the organization

By bringing partner organizations and newly acquired companies into its computing environment quickly and securely, Kindred ensures seamless continuity of care across all the services its patients need while keeping the entire organization operating at its peak. “We’re looking ahead at consolidating and virtualizing much of our infrastructure using Citrix solutions to create even more flexible services and implementations,” concluded Vorreiter. “Modern IT demands high agility and rapid time-to-market for business applications, and Citrix makes that possible.”