Citrix CTP Blog

Intelligent Monitoring of the End-User Experience is Necessary in Healthcare Environments More than Ever

Originally post by Theresa Miller at 24×7 IT Connection

Healthcare workers are continuing to find themselves overwhelmed, and the Health IT Professionals that support these workers with technologies that must be online and high performing are equally stressed. There is no time for EHR (Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, MEDITECH) or other system failures. All technology vendors must work in concert to deliver a successful end-user experience. If you work in healthcare and you are an IT professional and you are not proactively monitoring, troubleshooting, and documenting performance issues across ALL applications and IT infrastructure elements (Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, etc.) then you will continue to struggle.  Speed to technology resolution is critical, and lives are impacted if the technology is down, making monitoring and troubleshooting the end-user experience more important than ever.  Let’s look.

Healthcare workers need to focus on the patients, not worry about broken systems

IT Professionals in healthcare; more than ever, need to make sure systems are always online.  A purpose built-monitoring solution is critical to making sure this is possible.  Systems are complex, and there is no time to manually troubleshoot anything. In my experiences within the healthcare space monitoring was always important, but solutions implemented were not efficient and typically time-consuming. A solution that can be implemented quickly to support the surge of remote workers is no longer optional and is needed so healthcare workers can focus on the patient and not tech issues.  Keeping your EHR solution and other applications online, and available from home, should be front and center and ensuring quality outcomes by reducing or eliminating system downtime are more important than ever.

Telehealth – the new normal

If your appointments for routine and general medical follow-up haven’t been rescheduled your medical provider may be scheduling your next appointment to be via Telehealth call instead of in person.  Leading into the COVID-19 outbreak, depending on the healthcare system and provider this may be an appointment approach that you have already tried.  Just this week I received a note from one of my medical providers indicating that all appointments will now be done this way until the COVID-19 concerns are alleviated.  So, soon I will get to experience this firsthand and I suspect this will be true for many going forward.  Consider now how Telehealth will need its infrastructure systems to be online and working 99.9999% of uptime with support for reliable access at home.  There is no room for system downtime, all telehealth services must be up and working; monitoring and troubleshooting the infrastructure both while on-site at a health system and from a healthcare worker’s home office is now critical.

Peace of mind for healthcare workers and IT Professionals

Healthcare workers have one focus that is even more elevated and critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that is ensuring the health and well-being of the patient they are treating. A computer system failure can interfere with patient care in so many ways and can be life-threatening.  To reiterate from above – there is no time for EHR (Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, MEDITECH) or other system failures. When an IT Professional deploys the right monitoring tool it enables them to proactively address performance issues before clinicians or patients are impacted. And with the right troubleshooting tools, you can quickly isolate root cause when performance problems do occur – as we know they will. Finally, purpose-built tools will offer historical reports to not only prove when permanent fix solutions have been put in place are working but also to foster collaboration across internal IT teams, management, other vendors and end-users. As more healthcare workers work from home, IT will need analytics to determine if root cause of poor session performance is due to the application, IT infrastructure, or home office environment. Investing in the right monitoring and troubleshoot tools, ensure healthcare providers have the technology they need to do their jobs successfully.