Alok Khare – CIO Jaypee Hospitals speaks on Virtualization Experience

Recently Umbrella deployed Citrix XenDesktop for Jaypee Hospitals, helping the organization to achieve higher productivity, workplace flexibility in a simple and secure manner.

Mr. Alok Khare, VP Technology at Jaypee Hospitals tells us how the deployment has benefitted stakeholders. Mr. Khare has been with Jaypee from inception and is responsible for laying the infrastructure roadmap of the company. A major challenge his role entails is to blend immediate business priorities with long-term strategic vision—balance cost optimization and technology investment, while anticipating future demands and ensuring current technology and investments continue to remain relevant and meet future needs.

What benefits have you been able to extend to patients with Citrix deployment?

Desktop Virtualization has enabled us to implement our vision of Computer on Wheel (COW). A major benefit for patients from this initiative is that patients do not carry papers as we have made the entire patient journey virtual, from registration to consultation and doctors notes. So patients do not need to carry bulky reports and doctors can easily access patient history from any point in the hospital.

What benefits have accrued to doctors?

Doctor efficiency during patient care has greatly increased as they can easily access patient records and see reports from any place within the hospital.

Virtualization has enabled a great deal of flexibility to access the same applications and files from any place in the hospital, helping doctors to multi-task. In addition to patient-care, our doctors also pursue academic activities when they find time in between or when they need to access files to update data, irrespective of the location within the hospital.

There is no concept of fixed workplace as doctors can work from wherever it is required and from where they feel comfortable, resulting in higher productivity and of course greater convenience as there is no restrictions in accessing files at a specified location.

How has Citrix helped hospital administration?

Hospital administration can access applications from any terminal and process workflow requests, execute routine tasks, resulting in more flexibility and efficiency. There are fewer terminals as personal desktops has become redundant.

How has it simplified IT management

Routine admin and operational tasks such as back-up and patches are easier to manage as everything is stored at a single location. Licensing issues are easier to manage. As IT admin, we now have a single-view of the entire deployment, troubleshooting is faster and more efficient. We are able to ensure a more secure environment as files, applications and storage is at a single location.

How has Citrix enabled you to achieve the goals of organizational security?

Citrix XenDesktop ensures that data is stored in a secure, central location and cannot be moved out of the location. Information is backed-up locally and does not rest in individual terminals, reducing the risks of hacking and data theft by rogue, disgruntled employees.

What were the short-term objectives during migration and how did Umbrella help achieve them?

We identified a couple of points before embarking on the engagement with Umbrella. First goal was to enhance the performance of the desktop applications, as it was very slow and hampering employee productivity. Although we had deployed desktop virtualization before, performance was not optimized and employees were unhappy with the application.

Umbrella has re-worked the deployment and really optimized the performance, making desktop applications fast and available all the time. All shortcomings we faced have been resolved, employees are happy with the deployment and are using it.

What were the advantages of working with Umbrella as a partner?

One of the biggest advantages of working with Umbrella is they have extensive experience and understanding about Citrix technologies. The solution architects are Citrix certified which is an added advantage.

They demonstrated very good project management skills and are very responsive to customer requirements.