Guest blog post by Anne Hecht, NVIDIA
In recent years, technology has brought significant advancements in healthcare, completely changing how physicians and others provide care. Initiatives such as mobility, virtualization, and new ways of delivering patient services such as telemedicine and virtual care are gaining popularity as ways to reduce costs and improve patient outcomes.
Citrix Workspace delivers a consistent, familiar desktop virtualization (VDI) experience with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, regardless of device, network, or location. This delivery mechanism is cost-efficient and secure, centralizing critical patient data in the data center instead of in vulnerable endpoint devices.
GPU virtualization enables healthcare organizations to deliver easily managed, remote desktops that support even graphically intense workflows, while keeping patient privacy and information securely intact. This improves the efficiency of medical staff at all levels, dramatically improving quality of care.
Bringing Smiles to Students and Patients
New York’s Touro College of Dental Medicine (TCDM) is one of the first schools in the nation with a curriculum dedicated to digital dentistry. It also provides affordable dental services to the public through its dental clinic.
The college’s faculty and students rely on virtualized desktops to view and interact with complex 3D models as they treat patients in the clinic or work in the simulation lab, X-ray rooms, or imaging facilities. The IT staff is able to centrally manage, monitor and secure the operation remotely, while maintaining HIPAA compliance.
That’s because the college uses a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment powered by NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (Quadro vDWS). Due to its limited IT budget and its dentists and students requiring unlimited mobility, TCDM chose VDI and Quadro vDWS instead of physical 3D workstations. Graphics acceleration provided by Quadro vDWS offers workstation-like performance on low-cost thin clients, from any location.
The setup brings ongoing cost savings, ensures TCDM can manage and secure its environment from a central location, and easily scales to handle the school’s yearly influx of students, faculty and patients.
The college has numerous facilities with 3D imaging requirements, including a simulation lab, where students practice 3D modeling and computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing; a clinic, where they digitally X-ray and scan patients’ teeth; and a research lab, where they work on models, milling crowns, and 3D printing of dentures.
“TCDM has complex IT infrastructure requirements,” said Behan Venter, co-founder at Hudson River CIO Advisors, who implemented the NVIDIA solution. “Our team needed to engineer a solution that would support faculty, staff and large groups of students all concurrently using popular, graphics-intensive dental applications as well as running the full Microsoft Office suite and streaming instructional videos.”
The NVIDIA GPU-accelerated VDI system is incredibly easy to use with seamless session migration for Citrix. Faculty and students can go to TCDM’s clinic to treat patients, or they can work in the simulation lab, X-ray rooms, or imaging facilities. No matter where they are, they can work uninterrupted — as soon as they log in, work done at another station displays almost instantly.
“VDI on this scale needs high-availability IT, and it needs to deliver high-performance 3D graphics,” Venter said. “Thanks to the NVIDIA virtual GPU, the environment is fully capable of meeting these requirements.”
Learn About NVIDIA vGPU at HIMSS19
Join us next week in Orlando at HIMSS19 in the Citrix Ready Partner Pavilion (booth 527) to learn more about the NVIDIA virtual GPU solution play with Citrix. From doctors, nurses and staff accessing medical information on the go, to radiologists interpreting virtualized PACS imagery, to the researcher developing models to reduce the time to diagnose patients and improve clinical prediction, you’ll see how NVIDIA with Citrix open up new possibilities in optimizing patient care.
