Medical University of South Carolina Improves Nursing Staff Productivity and Caregiver Mobility with Desktop Virtualization
 
 

Medical University of South Carolina Improves Nursing Staff Productivity and Caregiver Mobility with Desktop Virtualization

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Founded in 1824 in Charleston, The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) is the oldest medical school in the Southern United States. Today, MUSC continues its tradition of excellence in education, research, and patient care, as it educates and trains more than 3,000 students and residents, and has nearly 11,000 employees, including 1,500 faculty members. MUSC operates a 750-bed medical center―MUSC Health―which includes a nationally recognized Children's Hospital, the Ashley River Tower (cardiovascular, digestive disease, and surgical oncology), and a leading institute of psychiatry. The medical center has more than 45,000 patient admissions, annually. In 2009, U.S. News & World Report named MUSC Health “One of America’s Best Hospitals” in seven specialty areas, with nearly 300 MUSC Health physicians making the prestigious Best Doctors in America list. In June 2011, U.S. News & World Report named MUSC Medical Center to its list of 118 “Most Connected Hospitals” in the nation. MUSC was the only hospital in South Carolina named to the list, and the honor affirms it as a leader statewide and nationally in its use of electronic medical records (EMRs).”

Committed to delivering quality medical care, MUSC Health works to ensure that its nursing professionals have the tools that they require to optimize the time spent with patients. As such, MUSC Health recently focused on streamlining the clinical documentation process to minimize the amount of time that nursing staff members spend logging in and out of clinical applications as they move from patient to patient. MUSC Health, after considering several solutions, selected Oracle’s Sun Ray Clients and Sun Ray Software to meet its goals.

Rolling out the solution first to the organization’s new Ashley River Tower, MUSC Health nurses are already seeing important productivity gains. In addition, the IT team is benefitting from improved manageability. IT staff can now quickly update applications and apply critical patches from a central location, eliminating the need to individually update hundreds of individual PCs, and improving the security of applications and protected health data.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from the Medical University of South Carolina

  • “At the Medical University of South Carolina, we are committed to delivering the highest quality patient care, and our nursing staff is a vital part of that equation. Oracle’s desktop virtualization solution is helping our nursing staff expedite clinical documentation, enabling them to spend more time with patients and less time logging in and out of applications. Additionally, the solution is delivering important benefits to our IT team, helping us to centrally and more efficiently manage hundreds of desktops to ensure peak application performance and security.” – Frank Clark, Chief Information Officer, Medical University of South Carolina

  • Enable caregiver mobility by helping nursing staff members to more efficiently enter patient data into MUSC Health’s clinical documentation system, maximizing time spent caring for patients
  • Improve ability to efficiently manage hundreds of desktops across the 750-bed medical center, including enabling timely application of critical patches and upgrades to clinical applications
  • Continue to ensure the security and privacy of protected patient health information
  • Support organizationwide efforts to improve operational efficiency, including the use of power-efficient, energy-saving technology, where appropriate

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Selected Oracle’s Sun Ray Clients and Sun Ray Software to facilitate clinical documentation at the point of care and streamline IT management across the university’s growing medical center
  • Rolled out 200 Sun Ray Clients in the initial implementation across the medical center, starting with the Ashley River Tower, with plans to deploy approximately 500 Sun Ray Clients – accounting for approximately 75% of MUSC Health desktops
  • Enabled MUSC Health nursing staff members to more efficiently enter vital clinical information by eliminating the need to log into a new session each time they move to a different location on a patient floor, improving the mobility of nursing personnel, saving significant time, and enabling them to maximize the time spent caring for patients
  • Streamlined management of MUSC Health’s desktop computing environment, as the IT team can now remotely update desktops, eliminating the need to apply updates and patches to hundreds of individual PCs, and enabling IT personnel to refocus time saved to other priorities
  • Advanced MUSC Health’s commitment to ensuring the privacy and security of protected patient health information through centralized updates and the ability to audit Sun Ray Client log in and activity data
  • Enabled MUSC Health to lower costs since Sun Ray Clients are extremely energy efficient and have many times the typical lifespan of a standard PC
  • Leveraged Oracle Database 11g―Oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, and Oracle Solaris as the IT foundation for MUSC Health’s clinical documentation environment

Why Oracle

MUSC Health selected Oracle’s desktop virtualization solution, including Sun Ray Clients, based on Oracle’s reputation for successful deployment in healthcare organizations. Particularly important was the ability for nurses to move from one Sun Ray Client to the next without having to log out of a session, saving significant time over the course of a shift.

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