CASE STUDY

By the end of 2023 , Eimer and his team expect to have reached 98 % completion of the initiative to migrate the hospital system ’ s entire workforce to Google Workspace and Google Chrome plus Citrix .

A great employee experience

The team understand the business value of a great employee experience .

“ We ’ re in the middle of building out a Citrix HDX environment so that we can offer a better user experience through the Citrix platform ,” Eimer said . “ We will incorporate Progressive Web Apps ( PWAs ) – from Citrix right on to the Chrome OS desktop . From an enduser compute perspective , we don ’ t believe that there ’ s another organization doing exactly what we ’ re doing .”

Game-changing technology

“ Sometimes we find ourselves having to be extremely inventive – ‘ MacGyvering ’ solutions rather than using traditional IT strategies ,” said Mark Eimer , SVP , Associate CIO and CTO – Information Technology Services , Hackensack Meridian Health ( HMH ).

‘ MacGyvering a solution ’ is a term that hails back to a television show in which the main character , Angus MacGyver , routinely used everyday items to do the unthinkable . Like MacGyver , Eimer and his team thrive on designing unconventional and innovative solutions to solve the large-scale compute problems that plague the healthcare industry .

Secure consistent operations

The team ’ s goal is to do things better , faster , smarter and more economically – yet in a secure , consistent way . Its most recent mechanism is a hybrid cloud , multi-cloud IT solution . For each cloud , there is a use case . While a few workloads run on Microsoft Azure , the majority of use cases are Google Cloud-based .

Migrations from Microsoft Office 365 to Google Workspace and from Windows desktops to Chrome devices are currently underway . The team is building out a Google Cloud environment for its data analytics platform and a Citrix Virtual Desktop environment with DaaS capabilities .

The solution has the flexibility to deliver apps and data to anyone at any time . Also , thanks to the new technology , Hackensack Meridian Health has reduced its real estate footprint significantly .

Citrix technology was first implemented in 2008 , just before Hackensack University Medical Center merged with Meridian Health . In the same year , the healthcare system began using Epic electronic health records ( EHR ). Since that time , Citrix has been the standard for application delivery and Epic has been the default app for EHRs .

To ensure security , consistency and scalability across the system ’ s 17 hospitals , Hackensack Meridian Health has leveraged the partnership between Citrix and Google since March 2020 . Not only has the hybrid cloud , multi-cloud technology solution empowered clinicians and staff to effectively deliver patient care , but also , it has resulted in cost reductions and helped increase efficiency .

“ Citrix has been a game-changer from the moment COVID-19 hit in March 2020 ,” Eimer said . He and his team quickly enabled 3,000 employees to remote work ; they were equipped with Chromebooks loaded with Citrix .

“ Today , we work in a hybrid cloud model ,” he said . “ We ’ re giving clinicians a platform that enables them to deliver superior patient care from any location .” The new platform is lighter , faster and more secure .

Centralized management

The Chrome OS platform gives the team a central management console . Every time a new Chrome OS device is enrolled , it is automatically managed and seamlessly consolidated on to one dashboard . This simple management mode has made it very easy for Eimer and his team to deploy over 6,000 Chrome OS devices . To date , 31,000 Hackensack Meridian

62 INTELLIGENTCIO NORTH AMERICA www . intelligentcio . com