NoMachine NX enables Glendale Adventist Medical Center to provide patients with personal computing stations.

About the Organization

One of the city's oldest businesses, Glendale Adventist Medical Center (GAMC), was first opened by the Seventh-day Adventist Church as Glendale Sanitarium in 1905. Today GAMC is a 450-bed full-service facility and part of Adventist Health, a health care system that includes 18 hospitals and a number of other health care organizations in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii.

GAMC, one of the leading medical institutions in Southern California, is committed to offering the most up-to-date services and newest technologies. Responding to the changing needs of the growing community, GAMC is dedicated to building and replacing the infrastructure and technology as needed to stay current with regulations. As Glendale continues to grow with the city, they are adapting and preparing for the future, offering some of the most advanced technology in Southern California.

The Challenge

Wanting to provide the latest and most up-to-date technology and services for their patients, GAMC searched for a way to provide a patient computing solution in the private rooms of their new patient tower. With personal computing stations located conveniently bedside in the hospital rooms, patients would have the ability to easily access a robust set of applications during their stay.

GAMC needed to find a cost-effective, stable computing hardware and software combination that would be easy-to-use and not require any in-room tech support. Therefore, thin clients and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) were considered a must, and a remote delivery solution was needed to serve the rich SLED applications from the server to the thin clients in the patient rooms. To create the patient computing solution, GAMC would need a high-performance server to store and serve the applications, a low-cost operating system for the patients to use, and resilient remote access technology for the patients to seamlessly connect to the server-provided SLED operating system and access the applications whenever they want.

The Solution

After being introduced to NoMachine, Novell, and IBM at Linux World in 2006, GAMC acquired all the tools and resources needed to make the patient computing solution a reality. NoMachine's NX technology, an award-winner of LW 06, became a vital part of the project, providing the most complete and efficient remote access solution: NX Clients connect to NX Servers running on IBM x3650 systems with the SUSE operating system from Novell installed.

NX gives patients access to an extended suite of applications from their own computing station located in their hospital rooms. The easy setup and installation of NX made for a smooth deployment of GAMC's in-hospital remote desktop solution for patients. NX also offers unique compression allowing connections over any type of network, including low-bandwidth and dial-up.

Results

These unique compression and caching features also provide a seamless remote connection from the thin client to the server, giving the patients the feel of being on their own personal computer, while reducing power and resource consumption by 60% and drastically cutting support costs. The patients can access a variety of applications to play music, view and edit photos, create documents and access the Internet all from their hospital room.

"We must be creative in finding the best way to meet the needs of our community, and NX together with Novell and IBM, provided us with a solution that was nearly unimaginable," said Senior Programmer/Analyst and Project Manager for this Patient Computing project at GAMC, Roger Pruyne. "After witnessing the patients' and their visitors' excitement as they crowded around the computing stations during an on-site evaluation, corporate is planning to expand the solution to all of the Adventist Health hospital locations."

"An additional advantage of NX is its SSH encryption which allows for the safe transfer of confidential information and patient records", said Pruyne. "It's for this reason, along with the easy set-up and access, that GAMC is working on plans this month to extend their use of NX to include clinical and business areas of the hospital for employee use as well."

About NoMachine NX Enterprise Server

A fully-featured Unix terminal server and desktop consolidation tool allowing users to create, manage and operate an unlimited number of virtual desktop sessions on a single server. Perfect for companies who need to offer a complete set of corporate services to all mobile and on-site employees.

NX security is guaranteed at every layer involved in the communication process. NX uses SSH public-key encryption and 128 bit volatile random cookie generation.