Assessing the Business Value of Outsourcing Business Case
Denver Health Operates with a Private Cloud and Thin Clients
Along with its main hospital, Denver Health operates the 911 emergency medical services response system for Denver, 12 clinics based in the Denver Public Schools, the Rocky Mountain Poison Drug Center, and eight family health centers. That’s a big organization with substantial technology needs.
Denver Health faced a problem of lost time incurred by physicians and nurses upon entering a patient’s room and having to log on to a computer. Even though Gregg Veltri, Denver Health’s CIO, had procedures and processes in place to keep patient-room computers as new as possible and to refresh those computers often to rid them of spyware, adware, and other inhibitors of performance, log-on time was still about two minutes. If you multiply those two minutes throughout the day by the number of doctor visits to rooms, Denver Health calculated that it was losing almost $4 million annually in physician lost time.
So, Gregg turned to a solution called Thinldentity. ThinIdentity utilizes a thin client—basically a high-quality monitor, mouse, and keyboard—in each patient room. All processing and information storage are maintained in Denver Health’s private cloud. These thin clients (Sun Rays) need to be upgraded only every eight years, instead of the typical two to three years for a PC. Further, each Sun Ray costs only $600, a fraction of the price for a full-blown PC.
Equally important is the sign-on procedure doctors and nurses use now. Upon arriving at work each day, a doctor or nurse signs onto a single station (Sun Ray terminal or a PC in an office), which takes about one minute, by inserting a smart card and then providing a log-on name and password. The doctor or nurse then removes the smart card, which logs off the session at that station, but leaves the session active in the cloud for the doctor or nurse. When entering a patient’s room during the day, the doctor or nurse needs only to insert the smart card and provide the log-on name and password to reactivate the session that is still active in the cloud. This process takes only 5 or 10 seconds.
ThinIdentity takes advantage of a concept called virtual location awareness (VLA). VLA maps each room to each patient according to Denver Health’s transaction processing system. When a nurse or doctor enters a specific room and reactivates his/her session in the cloud, VLA recognizes the room and immediately pulls up that patient’s information within that doctor’s or nurse’s session. This saves even more time. In total, the ThinIdentity-based system has saved Denver Health an estimated $5.7 million. The savings are presented below.
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One-Time Savings
$1.2 million reduction of desktop replacement
$300,000 reduction of desktop resource needs
Annual Savings
$135,000 reduction of energy needs (Sun Rays use much less energy than traditional desktop
Computer
$56,000 reduction in help desk calls
$250,000 reduction in full-time employees operating the help desk
$3.7 million reduction in physician log-on time13
Questions
1. Privacy laws and regulations require medical facilities to take measurable steps to ensure the confidentiality of patient information. From this case study, can you tell what Denver Health has done to ensure the confidentiality of its patient information?
2. Think about your school. How could it use the ThinIdentity solution to support the technology needs of (1) faculty and (2) students such as yourself?
3. In thinking about cloud computing (focusing on the public cloud), what role could it play in business continuity planning for Denver Health? That is, how could the public cloud act as a backup for Denver Health’s private cloud?
4. If Denver Health were to give each patient a smart card, log-on name, and password, which functions, features, and information could benefit patients? What security would have to be in place to ensure that patients have access to only their own information?
5. How could Denver Health extend the ThinIdentity solution beyond its brick-and-mortar walls? How would it work (i.e., need to change) to have doctors and nurses log on from home or use a mobile device such as a Blackberry or iPhone?
6. The reduction in physician log-on time is an efficiency metric. What are some effectiveness metrics that could justify Denver Health’s use of ThinIdentity?
