Rikshospitalet is located in Oslo, Norway, and was founded 1826. It is a highly specialised university hospital with special assignments in research and the development of new methods of treatment.

Rikshospitalet is a part of Southern and Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority, and is affiliated with the University of Oslo. About 60% of the patients admitted to Rikshospitalet are referred from other hospitals in Norway for more specialised investigations and treatment.

The customer The national hospital of Norway A specialist research and treatment centre for the country

Doctors and nurses needed faster electronic access to medical records
In a busy hospital, doctors and nurses require fast access to medical records when going about their duties. Medical staff at Rikshospitalet were becoming frustrated with the time it took to log-on and -off of the PCs around the hospital.

“It was taking valuable minutes for the doctors and nurses to log-on to a PC to access or record notes in medical records as they were moving around the hospital,” explaines Terje Klem, technical consultant at the hospital.

The IT team quickly realised that a new, server-based computing solution was required which would allow the team to lockdown the desktops with a standard user profile and deliver a single sign-on log-on in about 5 seconds.

The challenge Faster access to medical records for doctors and nurses on the move A more secure solution with smart card log-on A more effective and cost efficient system to maintain

Smart card readers are the way forward
Terje recommended replacing the hospital’s PC with thin clients in the areas where doctors and nurses were working. Working with thin client distributer Commaxx, the hospital’s IT team tested IGEL and one competitors thin clients.

“We wanted a system with an integrated smartcard reader to allow the medical staff to log-on and -off of the thin clients quickly and securely,” says Terje. “After tests, it became clear that the IGEL units were faster than the other tested competitor ’s devices.”

The hospital has now deployed over 300 IGEL LX Compact thin clients with integrated smart card readers. The thin clients are connected to a terminal server farm with blade servers, operating system Microsoft® Windows® 2003, Citrix® XenAppTM and Citrix Password ManagerTM and using Citrix EdgeSightTM for monitoring performance.

The medical staff use their building security smart card to log-on to the system. With a standardised profile, each desktop looks the same with email being accessed via a web page and direct access to medical applications. Once logged-on, the sessions remain open for up to 8 hours, allowing medical staff to simply take their smart card out of one thin client and insert it into a new machine to carry on from where they left off. The print functionality has been configured to ensure the thin client prints from the nearest network printer available as doctors and nurses move around the buildings.

The solution IGEL Universal Management Suite for standardised remote administration of all IGEL models IGEL LX Compacts for secure smart card access and single sign-on

The benefits multiply
“The medical staff are very happy with the new system,” explaines Terje. “Log-on times have been cut dramatically, leaving them more time to deal with patients. The system is also more secure and much easier to manage.”

The IT team now uses the IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS) to maintain and upgrade the thin clients from a central location. Using RMS, which comes bundled free with every IGEL Universal Desktop, Rikshospitalet has a simple to use management tool which can have thin clients up and running with just a few simple mouse clicks. Intuitive to use, secure and scalable to up to 100,000 thin clients, the IGEL Universal Management Suite drastically reduces management time for IT administrators.