Assessing the Business Value of Outsourcing and Cloud Computing

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.

·

· One-Time Savings

· $1.2 million reduction of desktop replacements

· $300,000 reduction of desktop resource needs

· Annual Savings

· $135,000 reduction of energy needs (Sun Rays use much less energy than traditional desktop computers)

· $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