Delivering computing resources is a little like real estate. When you’re buying or selling property, you have to focus on the three Ls — location, location, location. With computing, it’s all about the three Es — experience, experience, experience.

An elegant user experience drives adoption, user satisfaction, and, ultimately, success. A negative experience, on the other hand, can derail your IT team’s effort to support your organization’s strategic initiatives. While user experience is important in all industries, it’s particularly critical in healthcare.

Delivering Solutions to Address Evolving Expectations and Diverse Workflows

Consumerization of technology has changed expectations of how technology should work — not only in the home, but also in the workplace. No longer are users satisfied or accepting of monolithic solutions riddled with complicated workflows. With the mainstream expansion of smart devices, app stores, and task-oriented app design, users know there is a better way. They are pushing their organizations to implement technologies and solutions that simplify workflows and to create new customer-centric ones.

Not all physician workflows are created equal. For example, general practitioners have significantly different requirements from their specialist and/or surgical counterparts because of workflow requirements and the clinical environments in which they practice. In some cases, their work can span multiple sites per day. With all this complexity, it’s easy to see how challenging it is to deliver a consistent and contextual user experience, while at the same time maintaining compliance with security standards.

As cloud, enterprise SaaS, and mobile apps and workstyles become more and more prevalent, they are changing the way users work.

Transformational Technologies Add Value AND Complexity

In addition to changes in the way people access their resources, technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning (ML) are making their way into clinical environments, delivering value to both patients and practitioners. Whether it is AR to assist patients traversing through healthcare facilities, or IoT devices to capture real-time clinical data, technology is becoming a major factor in clinical workflows and in the patient experience.

While the information gathered is delivering improved patient outcomes, it’s also creating complexity for security teams. With all these applications, devices, and interfaces creating new clinical data feeds, the need for insights into consumption and security are becoming more difficult for organizations to manage and audit.

What’s the best way to get ahead of and manage these changes within your organization? Create an intelligent, digital workspace.

As discussed in the previous blog on this topic, a new breed of innovative digital workspace solutions make it possible for companies to serve up personalized access to the systems, information, and tools their employees need to be productive anywhere, anytime, on any device. And they can do it in a secure and reliable way.

So how do you go about building one? How can you avoid this trap when it comes to creating a digital workspace? Look for a solution that is three things in one: flexible, intelligent and secure.

• Flexible — With the right digital workspace solution, you can give doctors and clinicians access to all the applications they prefer to use in one, unified experience while maintaining a single control plane through which you can onboard and manage application performance without getting in the way of their experience.
• Intelligent — You can also leverage innovative technologies such as machine learning alongside simplified workflows to automate and organize work, freeing up doctors and clinicians to focus on patients rather than administrative tasks.
• Secure — And you can deliver it all in a contextual wrapper that dynamically applies security policies based on a user’s behavior and environment, allowing them to work the way they want with the confidence that their applications, information, and devices are safe.

This is the future of healthcare delivery. And with intelligent workspace solutions, you can deliver it today.

We’ll be at HIMSS19 in Orlando, Florida, February 11-15. Visit us at HIMSS Booth 2901 and watch for my in-booth presentation on Tuesday, February 12, at 3:15 p.m. (EST). Come see us at the Cyber Security Kiosk 43 in the Cyber Security Command Center. And attend my presentation at the Cyber Security Command Center on Wednesday, February 13, at 11:15 a.m. (EST).

Learn more about Citrix Solutions for Healthcare.