This Week Health

Don't forget to subscribe!

There are huge new developments in end user computing. How has our approach changed over the last five years? The pandemic uncovered a need for flexibility. We simply cannot have suboptimal experiences. How can we reduce the operational complexity? How do we break down our security needs? What happened when we sent clinicians to their home early on in the pandemic? What did that look like? How were we able to create a remote experience that mirrored in-person? What tools and systems were put in place for accessing the EHR? How did we ensure a good experience when they moved to essentially a new location of care? How does VMware differentiate in this updated environment? The evolution of healthcare is tied to the level of care. If a separate environment is really what's optimal for the patient, then we have to find a way to support that. It’s what you call a surround strategy. There are displacement strategies but what's more important to VMware is, instead of just burning your business, they make sure that they’re enhancing that experience and that outcome.

Sign up for our webinar: Delivering Better Patient Experience with Modern Digital Infrastructure - Thursday October 13 2022: 1pm ET / 10am PT.

Transcript

This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

Thanks for joining us. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health, a set of channels dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged. Welcome to our digital infrastructure to support the evolving care delivery model briefing campaign. This is being done in partnership with VMware, and I'm excited to get to our topic today. Developments in end user computing. We're joined by Cameron Luellen, director healthcare ISVs and Alliance partners at. This podcast series is gonna culminate with an excellent webinar panel discussion. And we're gonna have experts talking about enterprise cloud, cloud, native workforce, and the ecosystem that brings that all together. That's gonna be on Thursday, October 13th from one to 2:00 PM Eastern time. you can get more information on our website. As we call.com. Webinars are always in the top right hand corner. You can check out more information. In the description box below, you can find the registration and to learn more about the upcoming webinar. We want to thank our sponsor once again, VMware for making this content possible and helping us deliver on our mission of developing the next generation of health leaders now 📍 onto the show.

All right. We're joined by Cameron Lewellen, director healthcare ISVs and Alliance partners at VMware. And today we're gonna talk about developments in end user computing. Cameron, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Enjoy it. I'm looking forward to this, but before we get there a little, little personal note here. So you were the AirWatch DJ. Tell us a little bit about that.

AirWatch before it was acquired by VMware each to have a global conference in Atlanta where we would host again, all of our partners and customers in a couple of venues. And I would do the performance if you will, in the background, providing music that in most cases made people not notice, but when they did, I could get 'em to dance

man. That's awesome. I'm sorry, every now and then I gotta throw out the personal stuff and you'll be surprised cuz somebody will reach out to you and go, I didn't know you did that. That's no, that's a lot of fun. End user computing. This is an environment that is near dear to my heart. When I came into St. Joe's we had a, we had a mess actually. And one of the things that the physicians wanted me to do was to clean up the end user computing environment and and everything we're gonna talk about today is, is really tied to the clinicians. Experience and it's the frontline staff I mean, you have the, the doctors, the nurses, and many others rely on that, on that environment. How has our approach to end user compute changed over, say the last five years you're gonna, you're probably gonna talk about the pandemic aren't you

well, you know what? I'll try not to.

No. Yeah. I mean, you have to, it, it was the biggest event, right?

It, it was and it did sort of uncover again a need for flexibility, right? That flexibility that cuz really corresponded to the rise of all the various endpoints that people were now trying to use to connect into their work environments.

Right? Many of which may have been laptops that they had had at home and only used for streaming Netflix. And now you needed to be able to have that access core information. Right. But at a secure way. So as that sort of rise of various endpoints has offered new efficiency and new.

Different delivery care models. The data itself is really what we're concerned with, cuz it's now outside the four walls of the hospital and we wanna be able to make sure that we can understand how to take care of that for care continuity for control. And of course the quality of the interactions

was really interesting early on in the pandemic. Everybody was sending people home and it happened over like a two month timeframe. And then you had constraints on new computers, right? And so people were being asked, okay, Hey if you can stand up one of your home computers do this, that would be great. At least until we can acquire some systems and I heard some, some interesting stories.

I was like Hey, last night, this computer was playing Fortnite. And today it's connected to the the enterprise the, the data center and we're doing work on it. That kind of environment was, was kind of scary. But again, the health systems that had a good framework for end user computing and were able to spin that up.

I mean, you did have to add some things into, into the data center, but from a scale standpoint, if you had that infrastructure in place, You scaled that up, you were able to get to 15, 20,000 end users working from their homes. Almost. Almost seamlessly, it was amazing how quickly we were able to stand that up.

Yeah. I mean, we talked about the digital foundation and one of the previous episodes, and really this goes back to that, right? If you have a bifurcated environment, one that's really sort of set up just for personal and one that's sort of set up for work, then the fact that my son should probably forget about college and play Fortnite. The rest of his life is not a problem. Now, that being said, it's it's suboptimal, right? We would rather you be on a work dedicated endpoint simply because of the fact that we obviously know more about that endpoint, but that flexibility is one of the things that people that had already purchased workspace when we're able to take advantage of.

But we also saw sort of new adopters of workspace one. And in that case, we would work with like a partner. In some cases, Dell, or maybe like a WWT, just to kind of call it some specifics where we would essentially kit those and you would get them bill, you would open it up, you would put in your credentials and now, Hey, boom, that's everything that you need.

And that's a long ways away from maybe when you went into the, the health system and were asked to sort of update things and had to take each individual unit to, to update it or had to make sure it was connected to a particular network or had to consider the length of time it was going to take to update because of the fact that you wouldn't be able to do normal workloads on them.

so understanding that the top considerations really were, it's sort of those suboptimal experiences, the fragmentation of security, and then reducing that operational complexity. That's at the core of what we really try to do for UC

for our clinical environments, it was so important for us, the security aspect of it and the privacy aspect was so important. And one of the things I liked about having a really good solid. Virtual infrastructure around end user compute was the data never left the data center. Mm-hmm so it was, it was, it was one of those things where we could really track things, but we could also scale it up really rapidly. And when we had business associates come in and say, Hey, we need, we need you to give us your data.

We would look at 'em and say, well, you're not gonna get our data, but we're gonna give you access to our data. And we were able to stand them up in a secure way. They were actually functioning from within our our data center utilizing in a lot of cases, utilizing our tools that were available. So talk about the experience.

I guess we could talk administrative, but I'd like to focus right now on clinicians when we send clinicians to their home early on in the. pandemic what does that look like? How were we able to create the experience that they were looking to mirror? I mean, a lot of these people for the first time had to stand up virtual care, they had to access systems, maybe even some PAC systems and the EHR remotely. How did we ensure a, good experience when they moved to a essentially a new location of care.

Right. So the first thing is that I wanna just call out that they're people. Right. And some of them had the same kinds of fears that the rest of us had. And so it really was about care.

But it also was about like you said, their experience and how it made them feel. I, I didn't want to be embarrassed if I was going home and need to access a pack system and I don't even have a laptop. Right. So the first thing was trying to understand what was their level of connectivity and sort of what was their sort of understanding of how to access things?

Could we, could we replicate the sort of. In office feeling if you will, for lack of a better phrase at home. And so we, we started to look at first what the devices were that they had, what devices could we provide, what access did they need? It's very important. You just admit and mentioned workers that were coming in, wanted access to the data.

Look, we, we can put different levels of security protocols around the data. Not everything gets to be single side on, so you can just go in and have access to it. Putting those different levels also made people at home feel more, more comfortable as well. But on top of that, we had to also look at the network too.

Right? So one of the things that we started to do with SD wan is actually shipping boxes to people's homes and having it sort of preconfigured so that when they plugged it in now you're gonna be able to use whatever the best network is that's available. So that's kind of a two part question there, right?

Because one was the, the level of connectivity based on population density and what was in your area. And then two was the access to information that you actually needed and really sort of curating an experience that really overall led to a better clinician.

outcome

So I'm gonna ask the question, which is the elephant in the room. I didn't prep you on this, but I'm just gonna ask it, which is essentially no matter what happens, you're gonna have two environments in the health system. Right? So a lot of health systems have Citrix and then every health system has VMware. Now they'll have VMware in the data center and they may not have a VMware end user compute environment.

A lot of 'em have a Citrix environment because leading EHR provider really drove people towards it. And now, I guess my question is as we move forward, what's the benefits, what's the differentiator for a VMware environment? And we've been talking a lot about the architecture and the infrastructure and a single modern platform.

Is that the primary differentiator of getting to a single modern platform instead of a really a siloed system over here and the rest of your environment is that one modern platform?

so interesting question. I wanna be very careful how I answer it. Right. The evolution of healthcare is tied to the level of care. And so as an EHR, you have a certain. Entitlement, right? Because you are helping to deliver those outcomes. So if a separate environment is really what's optimal for the patient, we wanna support that. That would be really what you'd consider like a surround strategy. There are displacement strategies, but what's more important to us at VMware instead of just burning your business is to make sure that we're enhancing essentially that, that experience and that outcome.

And to your point, right, there are a bunch more applications outside of that one EMR, and that does contribute overall sort of to your culture. And then again, to your, your it protocols. Right? So to answer that in a way that that's Familiar and yet not particularly demeaning, I think that the EHRs are gonna be forced to evolve.

And I think that could be seen in some of the ways that they're architecting their newer solutions. I think that the surround nature of the system will eventually give way, I think, to more native outcomes and more sort of unified one system, if you will. But until then, it's not as important to me for us to be the one elephant in the room in terms of the platform that you use, as long as we are providing an outcome that is superior to some of the other providers who say serve up that EHR was that as Diplomatic as I hope that it sounded

no, actually, I, I like the, I like the answer because it does recognize the importance of delivering for the patient does recognize the importance of the experience for the clinician, but it also highlights the benefits and it's also forward leaning, right?

So this conversation of end user computing, isn't about what was in there last year or the year before, as you pointed out, this is changing as we speak, this is changing. And so when we look three years out, five years out, this is gonna continue to evolve. And I think it's important to have a partner that has a history, a track record of evolving their their infrastructure and applications with an enterprise view towards it.

So I really appreciate you answering the question. I just imagined. Everyone listening to this is gonna say, but I have this environment and this environment, what do you expect me to do? And I think you painted the right, the right picture. Cameron.

I'll give you one, one other sort of point on that if, if I will. So when we think about the aggregation, if you will, of applications, right. When my mom was asking exactly works, what works phase one did I got my phone out and I showed her how I could access things like my 401k my healthcare and I, that didn't tell her anything about my job per se, but it did about the product and overall how it made me feel as an employee and for any it system.

That's really looking at that and concerned about, Hey, well, I've got this and that and this and that. Look, we wanna look at your legacy devices. We wanna get in there and figure out how many you've got and what, which ones we can kind of get rid of and update and modernize. One of the biggest things that's taking place right now that still boggles people's minds is getting away from the fact that we're still using pagers.

We're still using faxes and we're still using landline phones. As we update those to iPhones, those iPhones. Are going to give you a certain level of connectivity, that's going to lead to all kinds of accelerated outcomes. And so yes, separate systems are, are going to be something that I think we continue to see for a while.

But modern EHR providers are trying to extend that in a way that is going to resemble more sort of the consumerization that we're we're used to outside of the hospital.

Fantastic. Cameron, thanks for the discussion. Love it. The next time we get together, we're gonna be talking multi-cloud, which is another reality for healthcare these days. Cameron, thanks for your time.

Thanks so much. 📍 Bye-bye

what a great discussion, love talking to Cameron fantastic insights into the industry and what's going on. I wanna thank our sponsor for today. VMware, for investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Don't forget that this whole series of podcast ends with a great webinar. We have healthcare leaders from several health systems coming together. Experts from VMware. And we're going to hear about multi-cloud solutions, enterprise cloud, cloud, native workforce, and obviously the ecosystem that brings that all together. You can get more information on our website this week health.com top right hand corners where our webinars are. You can also get more information in the description box below. Love to have you join us, please register again Thursday, October 13th 📍 from one to 2:00 PM Eastern time. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.

Contributors

Thank You to Our Show Sponsors

Our Shows

Newsday - This Week Health
Keynote - This Week Health2 Minute Drill Drex DeFord This Week Health
Solution Showcase This Week HealthToday in Health IT - This Week Health

Related Content

1 2 3 247
Transform Healthcare - One Connection at a Time

© Copyright 2023 Health Lyrics All rights reserved