Treant keeps clinicians connected to patient information

Treant Healthcare Group provides hospital and elderly care in the northeast of the Netherlands. Its healthcare environment is complex and always on, but Treant does not want the technology to feel that way for the people using it. Healthcare and office professionals need reliable access to applications and patient information without having to think about what is happening behind the scenes. Omnissa Workspace ONE® Experience Management for Horizon gives Treant greater visibility into around 3,500 unique sessions daily, and around 2500 concurrent daily VDI sessions, helping IT protect clinicians’ access to critical applications and patient information. Omnissa App Volumes makes application packaging and version management easier for the IT team.

Making complex healthcare IT feel simple

Treant’s ambition is straightforward: healthcare professionals should be able to concentrate on care rather than the technology behind it. Wherever they are working, the digital workspace should give them straightforward access to the applications and information they need to do their jobs.

“Hospital environments are complex and always on,” says Ernst Jan Schoonbeek, IT Architect at Treant. “We are always trying to make things easier and more standardized, so staff can simply concentrate on doing their work.”

When a stable environment is not enough

Treant’s first challenge was bringing an inherited mix of technologies and environments together so healthcare professionals could have the same stable experience wherever they worked. As a healthcare organization formed through mergers, Treant had inherited different operating systems and client technologies, including Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services. Bringing them into a consistent environment was an early challenge, as healthcare professionals needed stable and secure access wherever they worked. Its electronic health record (EHR) posed a further challenge. Doctors and nurses needed to access it as they moved between workstations, but the application did not roam easily.

Application packaging and version management remained ongoing IT tasks. Beyond VDI, Treant also had to manage approximately 4,000 enrolled devices across a diverse endpoint estate spanning Windows, iOS, Android, and a small number of macOS devices, each with different management needs.

There was another problem that infrastructure monitoring could not answer. Treant’s existing monitoring gave the IT team a clear view of infrastructure health, but not of the experience inside an individual VDI session. A clinician could be experiencing a slow application or lag within their session while everything appeared to be running normally.

“Users would tell us, ‘It’s so slow,’ even when our monitoring showed everything was healthy,” says Schoonbeek. “We couldn’t see the problem in our monitoring, but we believed them.”

In time-sensitive environments such as the emergency department, even a short delay can disrupt clinical work. Identifying and resolving performance issues quickly helps clinicians reach patient information when they need it.

Bringing the user experience into view

Omnissa Horizon has been at the center of Treant’s digital workspace for more than a decade. Treant used Horizon to bring an inherited mix of client technologies into a more consistent virtual desktop environment, delivering virtual desktops and applications to healthcare staff across the organization. Its EHR was an important use case because the application itself did not roam easily between workstations. Publishing it within a virtual desktop allowed the virtual desktop, and the EHR within it, to move with the user as they worked.

To address the visibility gap within that environment, Treant added Omnissa Workspace ONE Experience Management for Horizon. This gives the IT team visibility into the digital employee experience (DEX) within individual Horizon sessions, including logon and reconnect times, applications that become unresponsive, and CPU and memory use. The team can now see what is happening within the user’s session, rather than relying only on the health of the underlying infrastructure.

“With Workspace ONE Experience Management, we can see what’s happening in the VDI,” says Schoonbeek. “We can see which applications are hanging most often, and how much CPU or memory they are using. By identifying the performance issues affecting the EHR and other clinical applications, we can reduce avoidable delays and give clinicians more of their working time back for patient care.”

Using Workspace ONE Experience Management for Horizon reports and dashboards, Treant tracks logon performance over time and investigates changes. If an updated desktop image or application pushes logon times up, the team has data to see what changed. Treant uses that insight alongside its phased deployment approach, introducing updated Windows desktop images first into a pre-production environment used by around 20% of employees. If performance changes, IT can investigate before a wider rollout, reducing the risk of an issue reaching clinicians and affecting patient care.

Treant previously started with Omnissa ThinApp® for application packaging, turning to Omnissa App Volumes when needed. App Volumes enables the IT team to package Windows applications and manage the versions delivered into its Horizon environment. It is now used for practically all new application packages, with ThinApp mainly retained for legacy applications. The team can also switch to a newer version, or roll back to an earlier one, through the App Volumes Manager.

“It’s easy to create an App Volumes package. Most of the time it works on the first try. Switching to the next version, or back to an old version, is almost just a click in the App Volumes Manager,” says Schoonbeek.

Beyond the virtual desktop, Omnissa Workspace ONE UEM gives Treant centralized management of endpoints and applications. Its current deployment centers on laptops, iPads, and mobile phones, while the wider estate spans Windows, iOS, Android, and a small number of macOS devices.

“Omnissa is a nice company to work with,” says Richard Funke, Head of IT at Treant. “If we have a problem, we can call the team directly, and we always come to a solution together.”

Keeping thousands of clinical sessions moving

Treant’s Horizon environment handles around 3,500 unique sessions, and around 2,500 concurrent VDI sessions daily. For healthcare staff moving between workstations, the experience depends on accessing the applications and information they need quickly.

A clinician moving between workstations can reconnect to an existing session in under 10 seconds, reducing interruptions and helping to maintain continuity of care. From a fresh login, the desktop appears after around 30 seconds, with the user able to work after around one minute.

That speed matters particularly in the emergency department. “The first departments to complain about slow logon or reconnect times are the emergency departments,” says Schoonbeek. “When a patient arrives, they immediately need the right information.”

Treant limits the impact of problems with new desktop images by rolling them out in stages. An updated Windows desktop image goes first to a pre-production group so if an issue emerges, IT can investigate before the update reaches the rest of the organization.

Managing change has become easier too. Treant says the environment is more stable and secure and easier to manage than before, with patching, Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrades, and rollback all easier to handle.

Application management has become easier too. “App Volumes is flexible and easy to work with. Most of the time, we can create a working package on the first try, and switching to a new version, or rolling back to an earlier one, is almost just a click in the App Volumes Manager,” says Schoonbeek.

“I’m most proud when I hear nothing from our customers,” says Funke. “Every week we deploy updates and new versions, and we don’t hear anything from them. They don’t need to know what we’re doing at the back end.”

“We can provide a very stable, secure environment with less effort than before,” says Menno Bergeman, Solutions Architect at Treant. “We do weekly updates, and our end users don’t even notice. Not for a second. There is no downtime.”

Moving from visibility to proactive IT

Treant already uses Workspace ONE Experience Management for Horizon to spot performance changes during phased operating system and application rollouts. The next step is to extend that use of experience insights, addressing more of the technology friction that affects clinical work before it leads to service desk calls.

“We now have clear visibility into logon and reconnect times. That’s step one,” says Funke. “The next step is proactive monitoring, so we can solve issues before users need to call.”

Treant is also looking beyond VDI to how it manages its physical Windows estate.

Application delivery is part of that work. The goal is to package an application once, then use the same package in both the VDI environment and on a physical Windows device.

“One advantage of App Volumes is that we can package an application once and use it in VDI and on the physical client,” says Schoonbeek.

Treant’s goal has not changed: make the technology easier for IT to manage and less noticeable to the healthcare and business professionals who rely on it to deliver exceptional patient care.

About Treant

Treant provides high-quality hospital and elderly care at 21 locations in the North East of the Netherlands. With 6,500 healthcare professionals, 320 physicians and 3,000 volunteers, Treant is available in all phases of life: from conception to care in the final years of life. Every year Treant treats and provides care for approx. 200,000 patients and clients. The annual turnover amounts to more than € 500 million.