SEHSCT: Faster Logins, More Patients Seen, Less IT Burden

As digital healthcare services expanded across hospitals and community settings, South Eastern Health & Social Care Trust (SEHSCT) needed to modernize how clinicians accessed critical applications and patient information. The Trust extended Omnissa Horizon® and Omnissa Workspace ONE® across the organization to create a unified digital workspace. Every day, the Omnissa platform supports 5,000 concurrent virtual desktop sessions and 10,000 managed devices, laying the digital foundation for Northern Ireland’s first Epic* electronic patient record (EPR) rollout.

Building a digital foundation for better healthcare

As part of HSCNI, SEHSCT delivers acute hospital, community health, and social care services through a network of hospitals and hundreds of community sites. The Trust is committed to improving health and wellbeing, reducing inequalities, and supporting more preventative, community-based care through close partnership with organizations across health, housing, and education.

Digital health is central to that commitment. The Trust is focused on using technology to give staff the right information, in the right place, at the right time enabling faster, safer clinical decision-making and more connected, efficient healthcare.

Making secure care simpler at scale

South Eastern Health & Social Care Trust had been successfully using Horizon and Workspace ONE for several years in targeted deployments across the organization. However, as digital services expanded, new demands began to emerge.

In busy emergency departments, clinicians moved frequently between shared workstations. These aging PCs relied on generic log-ons, requiring staff to manually enter their username and password to access clinical apps. The repeated logins slowed access to medical systems and patient information, taking valuable time away from patient care, especially during time-sensitive clinical workflows. The use of generic accounts also created security and information governance risks if a workstation was left unattended before the clinician had logged out.

Beyond the hospitals, the Trust also needed to give remote, community-based staff secure access to the apps they relied on for patient care, wherever they were working. At the same time, IT was managing a growing mix of Windows laptops and desktops, shared iPads, and thin clients across its healthcare sites and settings.

“We had an information governance problem, a security problem, and we also had a productivity problem,” says Martin McPeake, Enterprise Architect, South Eastern Health & Social Care Trust.

The Trust needed to expand its virtual desktop and unified endpoint management capabilities into a comprehensive digital workspace able to support thousands of clinicians across its hospitals, sites, and community settings. Just as importantly, it needed to make secure access simpler for users while reducing the burden on IT.

Creating a unified digital workspace

Although Horizon and Workspace ONE had already demonstrated their value at the Trust, the IT team took the opportunity to reassess the market before expanding either solution. The Trust evaluated alternative virtual desktop and endpoint management technologies, including proof of concepts, to ensure it selected the right long-term solution. The process reaffirmed Horizon and Workspace ONE as the best fit, paving the way for a wider rollout across the organization.

The Trust first tackled the clinical workflow challenge in its emergency departments. Aging PCs were replaced with thin clients, creating a simpler, lower-maintenance hardware estate. Through those thin clients, staff can securely access Horizon virtual desktops that provide a consistent Windows experience that now follows them between workstations. Using tap-and-go authentication, staff can disconnect from one device and reconnect to another in seconds, giving them rapid, secure access to patient records.

At the same time, the Trust needed to support a growing community workforce, with clinicians moving between hospitals, community settings, and patients’ homes. These staff were also given access to a Horizon virtual desktop, enabling secure access to clinical apps and patient data wherever they were working.

Workspace ONE UEM simplified management of the Trust’s growing and increasingly diverse device estate. It provides IT with a single platform to securely provision, manage, and update thousands of Windows laptops, shared iPads, and other endpoints.

As adoption grew across South Eastern Health & Social Care Trust, that digital foundation supported one of the Trust’s largest transformation projects in its history: the rollout of encompass, Northern Ireland’s Epic-based EPR. Designed to replace paper records and multiple disconnected clinical systems, encompass creates a single digital patient record that can be securely accessed across the health and social care system.

Transforming care delivery and IT operations

Today, all Trust staff can securely access a Horizon virtual desktop. “We have around 5,000 concurrent Horizon sessions per day at any one time. Workspace ONE manages approximately 10,000 devices spanning shared and personal iOS and Windows devices,” says McPeake.

For clinicians, the biggest difference is time. Instead of repeatedly entering usernames and passwords, they tap into their virtual desktop and reconnect to their personalized workspace in seconds, without interrupting their session.

Fast logins and user switching give clinicians immediate access to patient records wherever they are working. With encompass, they can enter patient information directly into the electronic record instead of relying on handwritten notes, making it instantly available to colleagues across the care team. According to feedback from emergency department teams, those efficiencies add up throughout the day, helping clinicians spend more time with patients and see more people.

“Our clinicians in the emergency departments tell us they are treating more patients each day because of fast user switching and the speed of logging on to computers,” says McPeake.

Security has improved alongside productivity. Horizon has eliminated reliance on generic desktop logins, strengthening information governance, and reducing the risk of users accessing systems under another clinician’s identity. Centralized management of virtual desktops also allows IT to deploy security patches rapidly across the environment, ensuring users receive updated desktops the next time they log in.

Workspace ONE has transformed endpoint management just as significantly. Device deployment has moved from a manual, resource-intensive process to zero-touch provisioning. Shared iPads, Windows laptops and community devices can now be shipped directly to users, who complete setup themselves without requiring hands-on support from IT. The result is a faster onboarding experience for staff and a significant reduction in operational effort.

The move to thin clients has also reduced hardware costs and extended device lifecycles, enabling the Trust to extract greater value from its endpoint estate while reducing the frequency of refresh programs.

Perhaps the biggest measure of success is that the technology has largely disappeared into the background as the day-to-day burden of IT maintenance has significantly reduced. As desktop issues have declined and device management has become increasingly automated, the IT team spend far less time troubleshooting day-to-day.

Ironically, that created an unexpected challenge. Because everything was working so smoothly, clinicians saw less of the IT team. In response, McPeake’s team started wearing distinctive “Ask IT” T-shirts and now proactively spend time on wards and in community settings, talking to users, gathering feedback, and identifying new opportunities to improve clinical workflows and patient care.

“Fast, reliable access to desktops and patient records means our clinicians can spend more time with patients and less time waiting for technology. By standardizing on the Omnissa platform across the Trust, IT has moved beyond routine maintenance and firefighting. Instead, we’re working alongside clinical teams to deliver the next generation of digital healthcare,” says McPeake.

Lessons learned

Looking back, McPeake says the biggest lesson was planning for success. “We were keen to roll Horizon out to all users, and users were keen to get it because they could see the benefits,” he says. “We quickly ran out of capacity in our back end. In hindsight, we probably should have planned better.”

He recommends investing in capacity planning from the outset and keeping desktop management simple. “Don’t have too many base images. Have a single base image for all your users and layer your applications on per persona.” That approach makes the environment easier to scale and significantly reduces ongoing operational overhead.

The next step: an autonomous workspace

The Trust continues to build on its digital workspace strategy. “Our next step is Digital Employee Experience with Omnissa. It will help us understand what’s happening across our environment-from logon times to app performance-so we can identify issues before they affect clinicians.”

Longer term, the Trust’s ambition is to create an autonomous workspace where issues are identified and resolved automatically before they affect patient care.

“We want to understand what’s happening across our environment, identify issues quickly, and ultimately move towards an autonomous workspace that fixes problems before clinicians ever notice them,” says McPeake.

About SEHSCT 

Health and Social Care Northern Ireland (HSCNI) is the publicly funded healthcare system serving the entire population of Northern Ireland. South Eastern Health & Social Care Trust (SEHSCT) is one of five health and social care trusts operating under the HSCNI umbrella. SEHSCT serves around 440,000 people through three acute hospitals and more than 100 healthcare sites. With an annual budget of approximately £1 billion, the Trust provides acute hospital, community, and social care services across the region.