Dell Mobile Clinical Computing Significantly Improves Clinician Productivity

* Medical professionals reclaim up to three hours per week each, in study of Mobile Clinical Computing (MCC) at European hospitals
* MCC helps improve IT management and data security for hospitals
* Solution features latest virtualization and bio-metric authentication technologies with services that simplify implementation

ROUND ROCK, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Findings of Dell Mobile Clinical Computing (MCC) pilot projects at 10 European hospitals show how the right information technology can help medical professionals reclaim up to three hours a week for patient care by improving access to patient information and reducing application access time by an average of 83 percent. For the hospitals, this time savings can add up to £10,000 (approximately $15,000) in annual productivity gains for each medical professional1.

“There are real savings to be realized—in seconds, minutes and hours. And for medical professionals, that is time best spent with patients—not hunting for critical information.”

The adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is an important step in improving patient care and streamlining administrative processes and the study, commissioned by Dell and performed by Ignetica Ltd., highlights the need to simplify secure access to that information for medical professionals who use it for diagnosis and decision-making. Specifically, the study measures the time clinicians lose searching for the systems and information they need and estimates the impact of these disruptions to patient care and caregiver productivity.



MCC is designed for the unique needs of healthcare providers. It combines desktop virtualization, single-sign-on and strong authentication technologies with the expert consulting, implementation and support services to help hospitals achieve their operational objectives. MCC enables fast and secure access to patient information where and when it is needed by medical professionals no matter the application or device and keeps patient data updated and secure in the data center.

Key Findings

The study shows how highly-mobile medical professionals such as duty and charge nurses, attending physicians and medical specialists lose significant time because of cumbersome system and application log-on protocols. The study found that in traditional non-virtualized environments, log-on can take up to two minutes per application which compounds quickly for hospitals with hundreds of applications covering dozens of specialized disciplines. In many instances, system interactions—including the time to log-on and log-off—lasted longer than patient interactions. To compensate, clinicians either adopt generic, department-wide user passwords, creating information security risks, or update electronic charts and notes at a later time, creating information latency issues.

Implications

By looking at the use of information technology in various hospital settings, the study suggests that hospital officials should look first to deploy MCC and desktop virtualization among medical professionals with the greatest frequency of patient and technology interactions in order to improve productivity and information access in a more secure framework. And while not specifically assessed in the pilot, participating IT professionals reported productivity benefits of their own, including a significant reduction in time spent deploying systems, faster application updates and fewer password resets. Hospital IT professionals also said MCC helped them get more out of their existing systems because more clinicians could share each system and they could provide a hot-swappable replacement in the event of a failed system.

To build on these documented productivity and security advantages, Dell is expanding the breadth of its MCC capabilities to include additional industry-leading virtualization and biometric authentication technologies in the next generation of its MCC solution. MCC also includes the consulting, implementation and support services to help hospitals design the solution that best meets their needs.

“These results show how information technology can improve care efficiency when solutions are designed with the needs of medical professionals in mind,” said James Coffin, Ph.D., vice president, Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences. “There are real savings to be realized—in seconds, minutes and hours. And for medical professionals, that is time best spent with patients—not hunting for critical information.”