Ardence in Healthcare

In recent years the UK has seen a huge push to modernise and and integrate hospital and health district IT systems, it has not been easy but the results are starting to bring excellent new facilities online to all sections of the healthcare and caring professions. Doctors can access patients notes and records from any PC or terminal, they can even call up X-Ray and other scanner images as required, from the same desktop nurses can monitor patients and enter information in real time.

However all the other teams in a modern hospital should also be able to use any PC or terminal to access their requirements for example and in no particular order there are the phisiotherepists, the catering and diet mangers, the financial and management teams, the ambulance teams, the building and facilities maintenance teams, the social workers and many more - They are all important and the ability to access the key information they need when they need it saves time, money and often lives.

To provide this access is by no means easy with a traditional PC based network, Windows Based Terminals and solutions from Citrix or Tarantella can answer a lot of the problems but they are not good at multimedia or interactive services which require the power of a PC.

The Ardence Solution

There is no disk drive inside the desktop PC it boots using PXE from the Ardence server and when the user enters their credentials the PC displays the desktop image appropriate to that user, for instance it could be a Senior Surgical Registrar needing detailed information about a patient then five minutes later an electrician needing details of the switchgear on the 5th floor of the east wing.

Both of these are important but neither wants to see what the other was accessing, with the Ardence Platform both users will get exactly the desktop image they expect and nothing else and no facility for fiddling with it, if a user does break something a simple power of and on will load a fresh image.

The power of this solution is demonstrated by way it is used in the USA where many of the giant hospitals use the master images served by a central server. They have thousands of users and hundreds of diskless PCs all served by the central Ardence server(s). Some cities have started copying the schools and have established citywide networks of health centres all linked to central Ardence servers thereby eliminating the requirement for IT technicians to visit clinics and health centres to repair hacked or virus affected PCs.