Case Study: Kaplan Family Medical Center, Rochester, NY

Case Study: Kaplan Family Medical Center, Rochester, NY

Kaplan Medical Center is a 25-plus bed healthcare facility that serves Rochester in Monroe County, New York with over 100 ER visits and around 30,000 clinic visits per year. With innovative medical technology and patient-centered approach, the center provides birthing services, medical and surgical units, emergency medical services, critical care, laboratory services, radiology, rehabilitation care services, inpatient and outpatient treatments, and more. As with any other similar healthcare establishment, the center tracks the doctors’ practices for regulatory changes, as well as transitions to the new HIPAA 5010 transaction set, the ICD-10 code set, and SNOMED-Ct. The setup of the Kaplan Medical Center was as below:

• Software – NextGen Practice Management, Athena Collector, eClinical Works’ Practice Management, Horizon Practice Plus, and MS Office suite of regular applications
• Hardware – The center had a mixed-bag technology environment. Some of the earlier-established sections of the facility had Pentium and Core Duo processor-based systems, while in newer departments had the latest Core i5 processors; there were a few dumb terminals/thin clients as well, connected via the LAN.

Challenges Faced by Kaplan Medical Center:

• Rising complexity of multi-dimensional Healthcare management software that needed more and more powerful servers as well as desktops.
• Maintaining a large number of PCs with complex administration and support was taking a major chunk out of the already tight IT budget.
• Costly capital investments and fluctuating new hardware purchase requirements with every new section/department introduced in the center.
• Giving simplified, decentralized access for doctors and staff from anywhere within the center while on duty and outside during off-duty hours.
• Infrastructure integration, management of connections, and policy controls as per various regulations and healthcare industry compliances.
• Licensing costs for non-healthcare software like Office and its regular applications being used on a daily basis across all desktops in the center.

The center wanted to keep the patient data secure, give access to their doctors while being able to freely circulate in the facility, and make it easy for their internal IT to manage everything.

How Apps4Rent Made the Difference

Apps4Rent created a comprehensive plan for shifting the medical center’s computing to the cloud through the use of virtual desktops – a mix of “locked-down” or session-based virtual desktops and dedicated Virtual Desktops. On-duty within the floors of the center or off-duty at home or in transit, the physicians and support staff could access their own desktops through just a browser. They could interact and work on each of their line of profession software, be it NextGen Practice Management, Athena Collector, eClinical Works’ Practice Management, or Horizon Practice Plus. And they could do it from a PC, Mac, Laptop, Notebook, Slate, Tablet, or even a Smartphone. Apps4Rent’s virtual desktops offered these healthcare professionals “always on” sessions, were totally reliable, protected patients’ data, and were compliant with HIPAA, HITECH, ICD-10, ANSI 5010, and others.

Benefits of Virtual Desktops for Healthcare

• virtual desktops are provisioned from the latest server setups in Tier-1 data centers in New York, offering more than sufficient computing power to the end-users.
• All maintenance responsibilities like OS upgrades, service packs, and patches are done by Apps4Rent; 24 x 7 tech support on phone, live chat and email frees up the internal IT team.
• Lowest in industry costs combined with predictable month-to-month billing; fully scalable up or scalable down as per the professional requirements.
• Doctors now get secure, HIPAA-compliant, immediate access to patient records through PC, Mac, Laptop, Notebook, Slate, Tablet, or even a Smartphone – anytime, from anywhere, just using a browser – from within the center or remotely.
• Granular controls to enforce stringent policy adherence; meet all healthcare compliances like HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 code sets, SNOMED-Ct, and more. Patient data stays 100% protected.
• Apps4Rent virtual desktops come with Office 365 ProPlus as an add-on; can be installed on 5 PCs/ Macs, 5 Tablets, and 5 Smartphones for every user.

Post implementing the virtual desktops from Apps4Rent, Kaplan Medical Center found that every component of their healthcare software solution was easily managed in a fraction of the time taken earlier by their internal IT team. The cloud desktop environment was extremely user-friendly, adaptable, more secure and flexible. The “locked-down” virtual desktops were just perfect for the section of temporary users within the center, while the dedicated virtual desktops fulfilled the doctors’ needs to log in from any terminal, or BYOD to do their charting instantly while on duty or off duty. As for the non-medical staff, scheduling, workflows, billing systems, insurance claims, and collections became much more accessible and streamlined on the cloud.

Within the first quarter review, Kaplan Medical Center found that virtual desktops simplified the use and administration, maintained high standards for end-user experience, improved the security and backup of data, and fully met the compliance standards – all achieved while reversing the earlier upward direction of IT costs.

Apps4Rent is a Tier-1 Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider as well as a Microsoft Partner with Gold certification. We have been supporting 10,000+ businesses from over 50 countries – from Fortune 500 corporations to SMBs – with hosted technologies for more than a decade.