In my previous blog post, I discussed how and why healthcare is adopting a more open policy around remote work for all parts of the organization. While this is a major culture shift for many organizations and a trend that gained momentum since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overarching concepts and strategies that are driving these trends are the focus today. Over the last few months, I have been keen to understand some of the priorities, projects, and strategies that leaders across the healthcare ecosystem are focused on.

In my conversations with healthcare IT leaders, three concepts have emerged as priorities — agility, resiliency, and security. These concepts became drivers of change thanks to lessons learned from the pandemic and the strategies leaders are implementing to help meet the ever-changing needs of their organizations and patients. Let’s take a look at each concept.

Agility

As we have seen the last few years, the ability to adapt quickly to change has been key for healthcare organizations and communities everywhere. As provider organizations scramble to meet new challenges, the need to advance technology capabilities to keep up has become paramount. The agility they need must cover various aspects of operations and infrastructure, not just end-user compute.

The phrase “I want to get out of the datacenter business” has gained in popularity. Many organizations are looking across their portfolios to identify systems they can move to hosted infrastructure and software packages that might have SaaS options for an upgrade path. With others looking to extend these concepts to desktop environments, thin/light-weight client options offer extreme flexibility and extended life cycles. This, combined with innovation in DaaS solutions, demonstrates the ability to support widespread use cases, including many clinical workflows, while also improving deployment efficiency and simplifying patching and upgrades across the environment. With budget and operational benefits, as well as a simplified and consolidated user experience across all access methods, it’s easy to see why this is gaining favor among healthcare leaders.

Resiliency

While redundancy of core infrastructure and services has long been a priority of healthcare organizations, resiliency has become critical. Minimizing the datacenter footprint and the associated cost has led many executives to consider both public and private cloud options to facilitate various workloads. SaaS has also become extremely popular in the healthcare ecosystem, with many clinical-system providers migrating to the SaaS model, like back-office operations before them.

With the structural changes to the delivery of data, apps, and services, users’ needs have transformed, too. The environments in which users operate today have grown increasingly complex, and this type of transformation can degrade user experience. The concept of resiliency has evolved within this construct to include resiliency of experience.

As organizations embrace new ways of delivering services and their users adapt to new ways of consuming them, they must focus on consistency. Whether users are working within hospital or ambulatory sites, from home, from the field, or from a combination of locations, the experience must be indistinguishable. Access needs to be simple, concise, and contextually aware of the diverse environments in which users may find themselves. With Citrix Workspace, organizations can deliver a consistent, secure experience, that empowers users to be as productive as possible, wherever they are, on whichever device they need. Citrix Workspace acts as a repository for all things “work” and orchestrates secure, seamless interactions, wherever the resources may reside.

Security

Agility and resiliency come at a price — an expanded threat landscape. As organizations leverage cloud, adopt SaaS, and embrace remote work, they also increase the already complex security concerns they live with today. Gone are the castle-and-moat approaches, strict firewall rules, and complex network segmentation to bolster their security posture. Now we have systems of record living in the cloud and users accessing their most critical and sensitive data from home, all while PHI has become the biggest target for bad actors.

As the technical ecosystem has expanded to meet the needs of corporate IT, business operations, and users, so to must security. Zero trust network access (ZTNA), unlike previous iterations of secure access (VPN), was developed with these hybrid work scenarios in mind. A product or service that enables ZTNA, like Citrix Secure Private Access, creates a hyper-contextual, identity-based mechanism to continuously verify the who, what, when, and where of every resource within your organization, regardless of where that resource may live. This provides organizations the tools to deliver every part of their app portfolio, data set, or secure internal access to everyone who needs it, regardless of their location or device.

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With the ever-changing landscape of healthcare delivery, organizations must consider these trends as part of their evolving technology requirements and build nimble, secure ecosystems to meet the evolving needs of the providers and the communities they serve.

Interested in learning how Citrix can help your organization modernize IT? Visit us in person at booth 5049 at HIMSS22. You can also meet with Citrix in a one-on-one session to discuss your needs and priorities.