- One-Quarter of Medical Devices Still Running Outdated Windows 7
So, the hospital’s IT staff sat down over lunch in 2016 to figure out how to solve the problem. “It was a discussion about how we can fix this problem, how we can stop these calls coming in, and how we can stop people from getting frustrated in the field,” he explained.
The staff looked around for the best solution and decided that Google’s Chromebooks running ChromeOS provided the most cost-effective and flexible solution.
“We initially sent the EMS personnel out there with 12 Education Edition Chromebooks. Those rubberized bare-bone versions were more durable than the Panasonic Toughbooks” they had been using, he said.
Middlesex Health also decided to use the Chromebooks for education and training. “In a training environment, PCs sit idle. There are a lot of issues that pop up with computers that are not used day to day, such as a backlog of updates,” he said.
In addition, the training rooms were underutilized, and it cost money to maintain the rooms.
Using Chromebooks, the hospital was able to not only avoid the update backlog and underutilized room problems, but also allow staff to take the devices around the hospital and perform training in any location, he said.
Romatzick told HITInfrastructure.com after the session that the Chromebooks were easily integrated with the Citrix system that the health system uses to handle its data.
“We used Chrome with Citrix in ambulatory areas. We had a VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] that we were connecting them to. We would boot up the Chromebook in a kiosk configuration, which would boot up the Citrix receiver. The users would then log in,” he said.
“The other way that we use our Citrix apps is to natively run the Chromebook in a user configuration. The users would click on Citrix Workspace and log-in with a sign-in pass-through that Google and Citrix developed,” he said.
“You can take the apps that pop up in Workspace and pin them to the shelf. This has taken clicks out for the users and provided a more transparent method of operation compared to users coming from a Windows platform,” he related.
Romatzick said that Citrix and Google jointly built this feature over several years.
“The Chromebook can be the front end for any area. You configure it differently depending on who is going to get it. A provider would get a user-based Chromebook session, and they would be able to launch their apps independently. A kiosk configuration boots up to the Citrix receiver. We control all of that with admin policies,” he said.
In terms of security, the Middlesex EHR is hosted on Citrix. “All of the transactions are handled upstream. Whether the user has a Windows device or Chrome device, we have an encrypted platform, the antivirus is built in, and we disable the local storage on the Chromebooks for the people using the EMR [electronic medical record], so there is a lower risk using the Chrome platform than there is using a standard Windows PC,” he said.
“We can guarantee that anything saved on the Chromebook is wiped out. So, if the device is stolen or compromised, there is no data to gain access to upstream,” he added.
