This is the first in a series of posts discussing the ever-changing healthcare landscape and the increasingly important role technology plays within it.

Precision medicine is an emerging trend that delivers patient-specific care to treat illness and cure disease. The idea is that by understanding and treating the patient as a whole, doctors and teams of clinicians can create positive outcomes far beyond those possible with standard clinical treatments.

While cutting-edge technologies and breakthrough medications and treatments play a leading role in these programs, understanding the patient is most important. No two are the same. Even individuals who share the same prognosis differ on countless other factors that can and will have an impact on the way care is delivered.

Dedicated Staff, Unique Needs

When you walk through a hospital, the first thing you notice is the dedicated staff caring for patients with varying degrees of ailments. This is true from the emergency room to the lab, from operating rooms to the pharmacy. And like their patients, they, too, have unique needs and different requirements for delivering care and methods they prefer to use. While quick, secure, and seamless access to patient data is essential for all, the manner in which users consume things varies widely by individual user.

Some have hyper-mobile workstyle requirements. Others need specific clinical devices to monitor or treat patients. Others may need multiple workspaces to optimize the patient experience. And all need to be accommodated. Clinical environments are extremely complex, and technologies that can adapt to various use cases, workflows, and contexts are necessary. But delivery of a unique experience that enables each individual to work when, where, and how they want is paramount.

Each user has unique requirements for data and application access, security privileges, workflows, Io(M)T integration points, and consumption preferences. But most share a few things in common:

• They don’t want to be constrained by technology. They want the freedom to work when and where they choose.
• They want things at work to be easy like they are at home, where everything can be done with a few clicks.
• They don’t want to be burdened by administrivia. They want the key tasks they need to get done automatically delivered to their phone, tablet, PC, or whatever device they happen to be using along with the insights they need to execute things quickly so they can focus on patient care.

It sounds like a tall order. But thanks to another emerging trend, IT can deliver on it. Using intelligent workspace solutions, healthcare organizations can serve up personalized access to the systems, information and tools that doctors and clinicians need to be productive anywhere, anytime, on any device. And most important, they can do it in a secure and reliable way — without getting in the way.

Coming Up

In the next part of this blog series, we will discuss how healthcare organizations can create intelligent digital workspaces that enable their teams to focus on patients and on delivering world-class care.

Look for posts on these topics:

• Designing the intelligent workspace of the future
• Security in the age of decentralized care
• Healthcare gets smarter

We’ll be at HIMSS19 in Orlando, Florida, February 11-15. Visit us at HIMSS Booth 2901 and watch for my in-booth presentation on Tuesday, February 12, at 3:15 p.m. (EST). Come see us at the Cyber Security Kiosk 43 in the Cyber Security Command Center. And attend my presentation at the Cyber Security Command Center on Wednesday, February 13, at 11:15 a.m. (EST).

Learn more about Citrix Solutions for Healthcare.