Enhancing Mobility and Security for Healthcare IT

Creating a vision of health care technology that can support the health of all Americans in smart and efficient ways is no easy task. Though much progress has been made across the health IT market, several challenges still remain – everything from dealing with cybersecurity and interoperability issues to health care modernization and more.

To help government better understand these challenges and how to overcome them, GovLoop talked to Jose Padin, Sales Engineering Director, U.S. Federal Civilian & Federal Systems Integrators at Citrix Systems, a software company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software-as-a-service, and cloud computing technologies.

Citrix is a key health care IT solutions provider with large scale customer implementations in government agencies, including the Defense Health Agency and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Citrix also has an extensive history of offering solutions focused on instant access to secure patient data, which helps solve the challenge of bringing together clinical and non-clinical applications for better collaboration.

“One of the biggest challenges today in government health care is modernization of electronic health record systems,” Jose said. “There’s been a lot of well-documented issues around patient care and providing the fastest service possible to our war fighters and veterans. Modernizing health records and improving secure access to them where and when they are needed is a critical challenge that we’re seeing across both military and civilian health care.”

A second challenge, Padin explained, is the ability to support and secure multiple IT devices – especially mobile ones – within health care facilities. “We’ve seen an increase in tablets and mobile devices inside health care facilities. Securing all these devices and making sure that patient data is accessible by only those who need it is a top priority to comply with HIPPA data privacy mandates.”

Finally, a shortage of health care workers is a serious challenge to government health care service providers. Today, health care workers are mobile and need to be more efficient and effective with technology than ever before, so they can access patient data anytime and from any device seamlessly and securely.

“Efficiency is a critical priority,” Padin said. “Anything that we can do to allow a health care worker to securely work wherever, whenever, and on any device, is now a critical priority in government health care. It’s all about providing patients a good health care experience by enabling the mobile health care worker secure access to patient data. We need to balance patient care with a great technology experience and ensure patient data is as secure as possible.”

So how can government overcome the many challenges they face in health care IT today? One way is by centralizing access across all government devices.

“Government health care agencies need to be able to centralize applications into a single location, so they can be accessed by multiple devices,” Padin explained. “Consolidating the infrastructure, uploading patient data, then allowing secure access into those applications from anywhere is a huge requirement today. This will allow greater government health care efficiency, and enable users to work wherever they are on any device.”

Citrix can help the federal as well as state and local governments move forward on the health care IT collaboration front by offering secure mobility solutions to access patient data anytime on any device. Citrix offers a full suite of solutions that can provide optimized health care web site access with NetScaler. Regional hospitals and facilities can reduce bandwidth cost while gaining optimized performance with Cloudbridge’s SD-WAN technology. Delivering apps, desktop and mobile apps is easy with the Citrix Workspace Suite.

“Citrix has been driving health care solutions for the past several years for some of the largest customers in federal health care, and our mobility solutions deliver clinicians instant access to secure patient data helping to bridge the electronic health record gap to and from referring physicians,” Padin said.

Citrix solutions for health care simplify security, protect intellectual property, ensure data privacy and help IT meet HIPAA compliance mandates without compromising productivity or ease of use for the public sector.

At the end of the day, Padin believes that Citrix solutions are all about putting the patient first.

“Every day there are hundreds of thousands of patients that take advantage of the government health care system. The government health care workers need reliable secure data access to ensure faster care,” said Padin. “Every day they need reliable access to their applications which is possible through a Citrix system that allows them and the government to make sure that everything is efficient, effective, and secure end to end.”

Download the full guide here.