The City of Stockholm, Katarina-Sofia District Council uses ThinLinc to make the IT support in healthcare more efficient

Pär Adolfsson
IT manager, IT Söder

IT is used today in all parts of healthcare for different means and in different ways. However, the use of IT in healthcare is relatively low compared to the IT use in other areas of society and compared to what is possible and desirable today. More and more people demand a more efficient use of IT. At the same time the need for more and better IT support is increasing as a consequence of future changes.

”In 2006, the City of Stockholm carried out the project ”IT for all”, which aims to give all employees access to computers with the right type of applications. An overview showed that most areas needed better IT support, among them healthcare. For Katarina-Sofia District Council, ThinLinc from Cendio became the obvious choice for the terminal server solution”, says Pär Adolfsson, IT manager, IT Söder. ”From the very start we understood that the best alternative was to introduce Server Based Computing. With ThinLinc we distribute a desktop with the applications needed for the users to be able to reach their work systems, with the best possible economy as a result”, Pär continues.

”First out will be parts of the home-help service in the Katarina-Sofia district. The users have access to their applications via a customized desktop with Lisa Självservice (journal system), Novell GroupWise (e-mail/calendar), Paraply (support system for the health care sector), Agresso (economy), OpenOffice (office applications) and Mozilla Firefox (web browser). We connect to the central Citrix farm of the City of Stockholm where the assignment of applications take place. Almost everything is done with single sign-on via ThinLinc, so the user only has to log on once and ThinLinc manages the rest. I see the easier administration and the extremely high security in ThinLinc as something very positive”, says Pär.

”So far IT hasn't been used to its full potential, since it has mainly been used for specifik parts of the  operation. This is because it used to be difficult to agree on the demands on large coordinated IT support, the need for communication wasn't as extensive, and the cost of advanced IT systems was high. Many of the IT supports which have been introduced to municipal health care are used only for part of the tasks they could be used for and also have clear limitations in the interaction with other IT supports, but with ThinLinc we will change this”, Pär points out. ”We can now bring the IT support to more users with the available resources, in a much more secure and controlled environment using ThinLinc”, Pär concludes.                     

With the help of appropriate IT support all patients will receive good and secure care and good service. The health care personnel can devote more time to the patients and adapt the care to each patient's needs. IT will be used as a strategic tool in all parts of the health care sector and the combined care resources will be used in a more efficient way. With ThinLinc this will be possible to achieve.