Whether it’s expanding service-line offerings or embracing remote work models, there have been significant changes in the way healthcare is delivered to patients and supported by providers. The culture of healthcare has long been, “If the physicians and clinicians need to be onsite, then everyone does.” While remote work did happen within healthcare organizations, it was often limited to a very small population and/or very few use cases.
Two Years of Change
Over the last two years, with numerous nonpatient-facing roles shifting to work-from-home (WFH), healthcare entities needed to pivot quickly. The technology needed to adapt to these new use cases, and systems that those users relied on needed to be extended well beyond the workflows for which they were intended.
To compound those challenges, access to additional hardware to support remote initiatives, reliable connectivity, and expanded security concerns increased complexity for IT teams. These factors also affected the user experience. Employees needed the flexibility to work on any device, on any network, and in any location.
While many non-clinical roles transitioned to WFH, physicians and clinicians were affected, as well. The use of telehealth increased exponentially in the early stages of the pandemic and continues to see unprecedented growth compared to pre COVID figures. Even now, years later, health systems are continuing to adapt to what work looks like for everyone within their organizations. In a recent study, 66 percent of knowledge workers said it will be very important for them to work remotely – on any device – moving forward.
What Customers Are Saying
More and more of the customers I speak with are converting their current hybrid environments permanently to this scenario. We have also learned that people are just as productive in their WFH environments as they were in the office. Case in point, a recent survey found 65% of remote workers say that their work technology enables them to work effectively, in the way that they want, compared to 60% of in-office employees.
With all this change, there have been some challenges on the IT side in getting these production environments up and running to support remote work. This is due to complexity of access and technical infrastructure limits.
Some organizations tried to scale out VPN-based solutions, only to find that the physical infrastructure and the connectivity had to be scaled to handle the additional utilization. Other organizations leveraged their production virtual infrastructures to expand to their new remote use cases. Despite that, they found they could not support the demand. These challenges often led to various access methodologies, using different endpoint technologies, connecting to multiple systems. To sum it up, complexity ensued. Eight-six percent of knowledge workers agreed: A seamless experience is critically important to overall productivity.
There is a better way. A simpler way to access, organize, and secure all your workflows, regardless of where they might be.
Seamless Access to Work Tools Is Key to a Great Employee Experience
Access is key to any hybrid strategy. A simple method to authenticate into your enterprise environment and the distributed resources (apps, data, virtual desktops) within it can have an immense impact on the user experience. More than 85% of users say a seamless employee experience is “extremely” or “very important.”
Delivering a singular workspace to your users, to access all things “work” has become a necessity for this new hybrid workforce. Securely delivering virtualized windows apps, desktops, web- and SaaS-based apps and services and files to remote users is key. To further improve the employee experience, consider delivering these solutions into the same workspace that the rest of your enterprise applications and data currently reside.
With security becoming more important as we expand our edge to wherever the endpoint lives, these simplified and integrated security controls become even more important. A recent survey found close to 90 percent of workers believe security measures can/have impacted employee experience.
That seamless experience extends well beyond the initial login. The ability to leverage single sign-on (SSO) with every aspect of your solution portfolio brings enhanced value and improved experience to the end user, as well as to your IT teams. Gone are the countless service desk tickets for account lockouts and password resets. No more shadow IT finding ways to bypass password policies to combat the complex requirements your organization has implemented to help secure your environment.
Zero-Trust Security: An Important Part of the Equation
Adopting a zero-trust mindset also comes into focus as you begin to glean the identity of everything, from the user to the endpoint, across trusted and untrusted networks to your enterprise resources at the other end. The ability to verify who initiated the process, as well as being able to continue to validate everything throughout the entire session is critical to keeping potential threats at bay. Healthcare organizations may also want to consider leveraging technology that delivers automated session mitigations for real-time threat detection and offensive countermeasures.
With the hybrid-work model continuously changing, you need solutions that can change with your organization and the needs of your users.
About Christian Boucher
Christian Boucher is the Chief Healthcare Strategist for Citrix, serving as a subject matter expert, spokesperson and brand ambassador to provide strategy, best practices and trends to elevate awareness and differentiate Citrix in the healthcare market. With over 25 years’ experience, and the last 17 focused on healthcare, he has built a diverse understanding of the continually changing landscape, spanning across all facets of IT and clinical operations.
