TECHTALK: Avoiding Technology Barriers—Embracing the Double-Edged Sword
Raciel De Armas, Solutions Engineer
At the iHT2 Health IT Summit in Ft. Lauderdale, our CMO T. (Teo) Forcht Dagi, MD, MPH, MBA, DMedSc. posed the following question: “Is Technology a Barrier to Best Practices and Quality of Care?” Technology can be a “double-edged sword” when HCIT and EMR implementations consider only the technical implications.
Because HCIT systems include applications that impact clinicians across the organization, and run on many different types of machines, it is a common practice to deploy a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to simplify “maintenance” activities such as updating and/or upgrading the operating system/applications. This standardization restricts the ability for clinicians to optimize the desktop to match the clinical workflow. And get frustrated, making them feel like the technology is actually a barrier to best practices that impacts the quality of their care. But the clinician frustration doesn’t stop there. VDI also poses several challenges to highly mobile clinicians; including lengthy and recurring logons, role-based application delivery and printing-related constraints.
While simplifying IT activities, the challenges VDI introduces lead to slow clinician adoption of technology at the point of care. Interestingly, the answer to slow adoption is technology; technology that supports the clinician workflow.it is a common practice to deploy a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to simplify “maintenance” activities such as updating and/or upgrading the operating system/applications. This standardization restricts the ability for clinicians to optimize the desktop to match the clinical workflow. And get frustrated, making them feel like the technology is actually a barrier to best practices that impacts the quality of their care. But the clinician frustration doesn’t stop there. VDI also poses several challenges to highly mobile clinicians; including lengthy and recurring logons, role-based application delivery and printing-related constraints.
These challenges can be resolved with the right technology. That technology should include a core architecture framework that delivers proactive, reactive, or predictive context awareness–orchestrating the correct workflow at the point of care–and a context-aware platform that provides the operating system and applications with information about who the user is, where they are, and what they need.
This implementation can take three roads: IT can piece together several point solutions, which is time-consuming, expensive, and still may not deliver the desired results; build a custom solution, which may or may not deliver the desired result after months or years of development; or purchase a solution that is crafted for clinical workflow, which should deliver the fastest result.
Implementing VDI alone may make technology feel like a barrier to clinicians already struggling with technology that doesn’t match their workflow and is negatively impacting the quality of care. Implementing a clinical workflow solution alongside VDI can meet IT standardization objectives while improving clinician workflow. What best practices have you seen around VDI in a clinical setting?
