Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) is located in Barrie, Ontario, serving 450,000 residents in Central Ontario. RVH is the MediTech EHR host for the region, which includes Georgian Bay General Hospital, Collingwood General and Marine Hospital and Headwaters Healthcare.

RVH began their VDI implementation in September 2017, deploying Imprivata Single Sign-On and Dual-Factor Authentication, Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (formerly XenDesktop),  Citrix Application Delivery Controller (formerly NetScaler), and Uniprint Infinity Healthcare Suite for printing in a virtual environment.

The initial deployment go-live date was April 2018. RVH rolled out VDI across several clinical units over nine months. The VDI solution allows their end users to access their personalized desktops from any computer (both patient-facing computers and personal devices) using their ID badge. The ID badge, with Imprivata’s Single-Sign-On in conjunction with Dual-Factor Authentication, acts as a security measure to protect healthcare records. It also eliminates the requirement for entering multiple passwords to access required applications, dramatically reducing the time spent typing them. This means clinicians and physicians can spend more time with patients and less time recalling and organizing passwords.

A physician or nurse can tap their ID badge at a station and have their desktop pulled up from its last use in as little as 7 seconds. They no longer must manually log in, re-open all of their applications, and search for patient information, which could take several minutes. Instead, they can readily access patient information and mandatory applications on any authorized device with a simple tap of their ID badge. When they are finished using a computer, they tap off to log out instead of leaving the computer open to the risk of unauthorized access to patient data.

RVH calculated that on an average day, an ER doctor taps about 25 times per shift, which saves up to 15 minutes per shift or 65 hours per year. This means that RVH’s solution potentially saves them 65 hours per year per user to dedicate to their patients instead of technology.