1. technology and computing

Seattle Children’s Hospital –
high-tech means high-touch
Customer profile
High-tech means high-touch for Seattle Children’s Hospital. Dell Wyse and Citrix
deliver faster logins, saving each doctor and nurse 45 minutes a day.
Company Seattle Children’s
Hospital
Industry Healthcare
Country US
Employees 4,760
Website www.seattlechildrens.org
Challenge
• Improve system responsiveness
• Simplify management of IT
infrastructure
• Save IT costs without impacting
performance for business
• Reduce energy costs of IT
Solution
• C
entralized virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI) leveraging
Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp
• Approximately 3,000 Dell Wyse
Xenith next generation zero-client
devices providing access to VDI
Results
“I wanted the technology to support doctors
and other staff, without distracting them,
so that they could better serve patients.”
Jake Hughes
Senior Enterprise Architect
Seattle Children’s Hospital
• A
ccelerated connecting to systems
from several minutes to between
six and fifteen, saving staff time
and improving patient interactions
• Virtually eliminated desktop
technical issues, enhancing patient
service and saving an estimated
$1.2 million of IT staff time over the
next five years
• Achieved threefold increase in
desktop performance which will
avoid $6 million in PC replacements
over the next five years
• Estimated energy savings of
$300 thousand annually
Seattle Children’s Hospital specializes in meeting the physical,
emotional, and developmental needs of children from infancy
through young adulthood. The hospital is consistently ranked
among the nation’s best children’s hospitals by U.S. News &
World Report magazine. It’s also the primary teaching, clinical,
and research site for the Department of Pediatrics at the
University of Washington School of Medicine.
Seattle Children’s Hospital – Specialist
Pediactric Hospital.
“The faster VDI
logins easily save
each doctor and
nurse 45 minutes
a day. This adds
up to savings of
about 3,375 hours
of employee time
every working
day – which
becomes even
more impressive
when you multiply
that out over a few
months or a year.”
Mike Kindle
Sr. Director of Enterprise
Architecture
Seattle Children’s Hospital
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“Drexel DeFord, Senior VP and Chief
Information Officer at Seattle Children’s,
attributes much of the hospital’s worldclass reputation to one simple thing:
“We keep our focus on interacting with
patients and families,” says DeFord.
“That’s our number-one job here at
Seattle Children’s. And my job is to
ensure that technology supports staff
without ever distracting them from this
most crucial aspect of our work.”
But when Jake Hughes, Senior
Enterprise Architect at Seattle Children’s,
began observing how doctors and
nurses interacted with workstations in
the clinical environment, he knew he
had to make big changes in IT. “In the
team room, it took a doctor two minutes
to log in to the workstation,” he recalls.
“Then he logged out – which locked the
workstation so nobody else in the team
room could use it. When he went to the
patient’s room, he had to spend another
two minutes logging in before he could
pull up the patient’s file. The patient and
family were just sitting there, watching.
It sent the wrong message.”
Hughes vowed to change that. He
envisioned a technical infrastructure
that would enable staff simply to walk
up to any computer on the hospital
campus and securely and reliably pull
up their own desktop within seconds.
“I wanted the technology to support
doctors and other staff, without
distracting them, so that they could
better serve patients,” he explains.
DeFord supports 5,500 workstations
with a staff of approximately 180.
“Even though we’d already centralized
and virtualized key applications with
Citrix XenApp, different machines
behaved differently and had different
software loaded on to them,” he
recalls. He asked Hughes to find an
infrastructure that would provide
greater consistency across the hospital’s
standard desktop, so that each machine
worked the same way, every time,
without performance issues or failures.
After extensive research, Hughes and his
team undertook what he describes as
a “transformational journey” to adopt a
virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with
zero-client desktop devices.
“We wanted the technology to be so fast,
pervasive, and intuitive for our staff that
it was almost invisible to our patients,”
explains Mike Kindle, Sr. Director of
Enterprise Architecture at Seattle
Children’s. “As soon as we identified
VDI as our approach, we knew we
wanted Citrix and Dell Wyse as our
partners. The partnership between the
companies and the integration of their
technologies made us confident that
they would work together to help us get
the solution we wanted.”
Solution
VDI with Citrix and Dell Wyse Xenith
next generation Zero Clients
Seattle Children’s had been using Citrix
XenApp for years to deliver centralized
applications to workstations. Now it
has branched out to implement Citrix
XenDesktop, creating single sign-on
access to multiple siloed applications
with just one reconnect. For optimal
access to the VDI, Seattle Children’s
is implementing 3,000 Dell Wyse
Xenith next-generation zero clients
across all its administrative and clinical
environments, with 1,000 devices
currently implemented. The hospital is
committed to making a clean-sweep
transition to VDI.
“The Dell Wyse Xenith does exactly what
we want – it provides a login interface
and VDI – and it does that beautifully,
while taking very little desktop space,”
says Hughes. “The Xenith was made for
XenDesktop – and it shows. The two
technologies interact seamlessly.”
The team uses a simple management
plugin, Dell Wyse Xenith Manager, to
support everything from printers to iPads.
“Everything we’ve tried to add has worked,
with little or no configuration,” explains
Hughes. “We just select the appropriate
firmware and right-click.” At Seattle
Children’s, the Xenith clients support
multiple monitors, smart cards, and
plug-and-play for thumb drives, CD/DVD,
USB headsets, mice, keyboards, cameras,
smart phones, printers, and even iPads.
Dell Wyse’s new next-generation zero
client technology effectively eliminates
the problems with hardware-only type
zero clients, which present issues with
user experience and scalability.
Hughes’ team uses a legacy server,
XenApp and XenDesktop to provision
a single, centrally managed image to
thousands of users. XenApp SuperSilo
enables the team to serve almost all
applications from one server for a faster,
streamlined user experience.
The hospital uses a local policy rather
than a group policy to govern logons,
reducing VDI logon times from minutes
3
with a PC, or 50 seconds on a VDI
client, to just 20 seconds on the Dell
Wyse Xenith. Users just log on once
at the beginning of the day, and then
move around the hospital, with the
option of plugging their Gemalto smart
cards into the smartcard readers of
whatever units they want to use at the
time. They type in their PINs, or user ID
and password, and within seconds, they
are reconnected. When they’re ready
to leave units, they pull out their smart
cards or hit the disconnect button and
their sessions close securely, ready to
be reopened whenever and wherever
employees wish.
Faster log-ins means Doctors and
Nurses each save 45 minutes a day.
Benefits
VDI delivers data without distraction
“Dell Wyse Xenith next-generation zero
clients simplify the end point of our IT
infrastructure, over the next five years,
we anticipate we’ll save about $6 million
in hardware, $1.2 million in staff time,
and $1 million in energy costs,” explains
DeFord. “Plus, because this infrastructure
enables us to manage at the server level,
it increases manageability, security, and
availability. Our doctors and nurses can
do their jobs better, without technical
distractions, and our IT team can
redirect their time and energy from
fixing PCs to serving the hospital in more
strategic roles.”
Intuitive, always-on access supports
focus on patients, not PCs
Saving several minutes from initial logon
times and subsequent reconnections
may not seem important at first,
but DeFord is quick to correct that
impression. “First, consider that two
minutes can be a very long time to
wait when a doctor or nurse is in an
exam room with a patient,” says DeFord.
“Doctors and nurses need technology to
be there for them, seamlessly, so that
they can deal with the most pressing
challenges of their work. Plus, with staff
continually moving from room to room
during the day, the faster VDI logins
easily save each doctor and nurse
45 minutes a day. This adds up to savings
of about 3,375 hours of employee time
Delivering increased manageability,
security and availability.
“The Dell Wyse
Xenith units offered
dramatically faster
response: faster
logins, the ability
to save settings
more quickly, and
to pull up previously
viewed information
in a fraction of the
time required for a
workstation.
That’s really why
we’re all here,”
says DeFord.
“Not to make the
technology work,
but to make the
patients feel better.”
Drexel DeFord
Senior VP and
Chief Information Officer
Seattle Children’s Hospital
every working day – which becomes
even more impressive when you multiply
that over a few months or a year.”
VDI with Dell Wyse Xenith nextgeneration zero clients also saves
time that might otherwise be spent in
a training room. “We’ve never had to
train users on the Dell Wyse units,” says
Hughes. “They give our users the same
desktop interface every time, making it
so intuitive for them that there’s never
been a need for training. That’s worth
a lot to us. Even if we only had to train
users for an hour each, that could
disrupt our services, annoy our staff,
and cost Seattle Children’s thousands
of hours of our experts’ time.”
Centralized management keeps
technicians in data center, not
exam rooms
For Hughes and his team, their work has
changed radically. “We used to spend
hours of our time going around the
campus managing individual desktop
machines, but not anymore,” he explains.
“We now deal with software issues in
the data center: we patch or update just
one master image, and the next time a
device reboots, it immediately has the
latest image.” In particular, Hughes
is delighted that there is no more ‘patch
Tuesday. “We used to deploy patches on
Tuesdays,” he says. “It took hours, and
even then, we knew we weren’t getting
through to all 5,500 desktops. Now,
with Dell Wyse, we configure everything
centrally and roll it out to every Dell
Wyse Xenith immediately. And with just
4 MB of firmware per Dell Wyse Xenith, if
we ever needed to do a firmware update,
it would take less than a minute.”
As for hardware issues, they’re going
to be history. Technicians won’t have
to spend time repairing units. On the
rare occasions when units need to be
replaced, technicians may not need to
come out. “We’re caching machines
around campus, and anyone can pull
a Dell Wyse Xenith out of a box and
prepare it for use. All you have to do is
4
plug it in,” Hughes explains. “Our users
get better service – and we’ll hardly
ever have to make house calls.” The
Dell Wyse Xenith detects the network,
and then the server configures it to
the hospital’s preferences. In about
five minutes – less time than it would
take just for a technician to reach the
exam room – a non-technical staffer
can replace a machine and be back in
action with all required applications and
peripheral support.
Using XenApp to provide a VDI image
of the Windows 7 desktop makes for a
predictable, scalable workload. Users get
access to their applications, but those
applications are very rarely streamed.
Hughes appreciates the predictability.
“When I’m adding several hundred or
even a thousand new users, I just take
the number of users to add, multiply
it by the capacity I estimate each user
requires, and plan accordingly,” he says.
“There are almost no surprises in scaling.”
High-Performance Multimedia brings
staff everything they need to know
Hughes refers to the Dell Wyse Xenith
as the “zero compromise” device. “The
Dell Wyse Xenith next-generation zero
clients are built for Citrix,” he says. “They
have the best HDX client for multimedia
performance this side of Windows
32 – and with their redirection support,
multimedia decoder, and built-in Citrix
receiver, perform much better than any
non-Windows device. In our tests, the
Dell Wyse Xenith performed three times
faster than any other end-user device.”
This is key for users, who work with
several media-based applications. They
can make calls using the USB headset
connected to the Dell Wyse units,
view information in a variety of video
formats, and even watch physicians
making rounds or surgeons performing
operations. This way, other experts
can observe – and trainees can learn –
while sitting at their desks instead of all
crowding into the same room.
Energy and cost savings frees funds for patient care
In addition to consuming less time and human resources, the
Dell Wyse Xenith units also consume dramatically less power, saving
Seattle Childrens’ an estimated $300K in energy each year.
“Each unit uses 7 watts instead of 70 watts for a PC,” says Hughes.
“When we calculate our estimated use – 10 hours per weekday at 15
KWh, we project savings of 189,000W just for the first 3,000 Dell Wyse
Xenith units. No multimedia-rich client uses less energy than the Dell
Wyse Xenith next generation zero clients.”
ROI factor
ROI calculation
Benefit / Cost avoidance
Reduced
hardware costs
Reduces PC and contractor
costs over 5 years
Avoid $6 million in
PC replacement and
deployment
Reduced login
times
Reducing VDI logon times
from two minutes with a PC
to just 20 seconds on Dell
Wyse Xenith and 5 seconds
for each reconnection
Saves an average of
45 minutes per day,
per employee – or
approximately 3,375 hours
per day across all users
Reduction in
support overhead
Technicians no longer spend
as much of their time on
repairs of individual units
Frees technical staff to
spend more time on
higher-value activities
Longer lifecycle:
8 years vs.
4 years
Using the same zero client
for eight years instead of
buying two PCs over the
same period saves $600
For 4,000 units over
8-year period, projected
$2.4 million in
hardware savings
Lower electricity
consumption
Energy savings of 189,000W
for the first 3,000 units
For 3,000 zero clients,
estimated energy savings
of $300,000 annually
Doctors and Nurses can do their jobs
better, without technical distractions.
“Dell Wyse Xenith
next-generation
zero clients simplify
the end point of our
IT infrastructure,
over the next five
years, we anticipate
we’ll save about
$6 million in
hardware, $1.2
million in staff time,
and $1 million in
energy costs.”
Drexel DeFord
Senior VP and
Chief Information Officer
Seattle Children’s Hospital
5
Conclusion
VDI supports staff so they can
support patients
Seattle Children’s Hospital’s new VDI fulfills
DeFord’s vision of enabling users to access
any applications or data from any device,
anywhere, all at optimal speeds and
with minimal connection times. “Based
on our experience with the Dell Wyse
Xenith units, we strongly recommend
that organizations adopting VDI transition
as swiftly as possible from using PCs as
clients to implementing thin- or preferably
next-generation zero-client units,” says
Hughes. “The endpoint has a tremendous
influence on security and manageability of
the entire VDI. We understand that budget
limitations can mean that an organization
has to continue to use some PCs for a
while after moving to VDI, but we’d urge
them to look at the big picture of zeroclient cost savings and move to zero
clients as rapidly as possible to get the full
benefit of VDI.”
DeFord has come to see the traditional
desktops in a new light. “Before, I would
have said that the main problem with
PCs was that their limited flexibility,
security issues, and constant need for
refresh took too much time and caused
too much disruption,” he says. “Now
I’m more aware of how much they
slow implementation of new initiatives
and decrease agility. In contrast, with
VDI, we’re transforming desktop
computing into an on-demand service
for any user on any device. We’re
enabling virtual work styles, leveraging
the latest mobile devices, and adapting
to changes in the business more rapidly
than we ever could have done with our
traditional desktops. And it’s all in the
service of improving the quality of our
interaction with patients. In healthcare,
every click counts – and so does every
moment spent interacting directly with
a patient.”
“The faster logins
alone won the
wholehearted
enthusiasm of the
clinical staff. Now
that screens come
up so quickly and
reliably, clinicians
can spend less time
struggling with
keyboards and
screens, and more
time caring for
patients.”
Drexel DeFord
Senior VP and
Chief Information Officer
Seattle Children’s Hospital
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This case study is for informational purposes only. Dell makes no warranties express or implied - in this case study. Reference number 10011388