EUC Tips for Healthcare Updates and Patch Rollouts

December 18, 2023

EUC (End-User Computing) teams in healthcare settings often grapple with myriad frustrations stemming from the unique challenges inherent in managing technology within the context of patient care.

One recurring frustration is the constant pressure to ensure the seamless operation of clinical applications and systems, given the critical nature of healthcare workflows. Unforeseen issues, such as compatibility glitches between various medical devices and software updates, can lead to disruptions, testing the team’s ability to maintain a stable and reliable infrastructure.

A daily concern centers around strict data security and privacy regulations, particularly those governing patient records, such as HIPAA. Juggling the need for security updates while protecting sensitive information poses an ongoing challenge. This often leads to an increase in human labor to meet demand, meaning higher staffing costs as more people are necessary to complete redundant tasks prone to human error.

How to Minimize Patient Care Impact During EUC Updates

The round-the-clock nature of healthcare operations means that EUC teams must find windows for updates that minimize the impact on patient care, introducing a constant juggling act. As technology advances, EUC teams must navigate these daily challenges to balance innovation, security, and the uninterrupted delivery of patient care.

Due to this complexity, rolling out updates and patches in healthcare settings comes with challenges, such as:

Patient Data Security and Privacy:
Healthcare organizations must comply with regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to ensure the security and privacy of patient information. EUC teams need to ensure that updates and patches maintain these standards, and any solutions that they leverage for support must meet this high barrier of entry as well.

System Downtime:
Healthcare facilities operate 24/7, and any system downtime can directly affect patient care. EUC teams must plan updates during low-impact hours and have strategies to minimize disruptions. To ensure uninterrupted operations, downtime must be scheduled with strict adherence to plans and contingencies. The necessity for redundancy in systems also contributes to increased expenses. Frequently, organizations find themselves maintaining entire sets of standby equipment, essentially idling on the shelf, in readiness for any potential disruption.

Compatibility and Integration:
Healthcare systems rely on a myriad of specialized applications. Ensuring compatibility and seamless integration after updates is crucial to prevent disruptions in workflows and patient care.

Testing and Validation:
Teams frequently face the challenge of making sacrifices to meet demand, raising questions about potential costs, the extent of testing coverage, and the time allocated to building automation or workflows—essentially, a push and pull dynamic.

To ensure that updates and patches don’t disrupt critical clinical workflows, rigorous testing is imperative. EUC teams must conduct thorough testing in simulated environments to identify and resolve issues before deployment. By leveraging the results of this testing, teams can make well-informed decisions that contribute to the most effective outcomes for the organization.

Backup and Disaster Recovery:
Before implementing updates, EUC teams must ensure robust backup and disaster recovery mechanisms to prevent data loss or corruption during the update process.
Regulatory Compliance:

Network Bandwidth and Infrastructure:
Frequent updates can overwhelm network bandwidth, possibly impacting the performance of essential systems. Additionally, hosting workflows in the cloud incurs costs, particularly when data transfer (ingress and egress) is metered. EUC teams should strategize for the effective distribution of updates to prevent network congestion.

Emergency Preparedness:
If an issue arises during the update, EUC teams should have well-defined rollback procedures to quickly revert to the previous system state to minimize downtime and impact on patient care.

7 Ways EUC Teams Can Streamline Rollouts and Mitigate Risk

Login Enterprise is a valuable tool for EUC teams in healthcare settings. Here’s how:

1. Pre-Deployment Testing: Use Login Enterprise to create realistic virtual user transactions that mimic clinical workflows. This enables thorough pre-deployment testing of updates and patches, allowing EUC teams to identify potential issues before they impact end-users.
2. Ongoing Performance Monitoring: Healthcare settings operate 24/7, 365 days a year, and so does Login Enterprise—Leverage Login Enterprise’s performance monitoring capabilities to assess the impact of updates on system performance. By continuously monitoring key metrics, EUC teams can proactively address even the slightest performance issues that arise during or after the rollout.
3. User Experience Validation: Ensure a positive user experience by simulating user interactions with applications before and after updates. Login Enterprise can provide insights into any degradation in application responsiveness, helping EUC teams address user experience concerns promptly.
4. Compatibility Testing: With a diverse range of clinical applications and devices in healthcare settings, Login Enterprise can help EUC teams perform comprehensive compatibility testing. Simulate interactions with different applications to verify that updates do not adversely affect the overall system integration or functionality.
5. Scheduling and Automation: Implement Login Enterprise for scheduling virtual user sessions during low-impact hours. This enables EUC teams to automate testing, reducing disruptions to regular clinical workflows. Automation guarantees thorough and efficient testing. With Login Enterprise, EUC teams can automatically manage the testing infrastructure, enabling them to spin up and down resources as needed to control associated costs.
6. Capacity Planning: Evaluate the capacity of the infrastructure by using Login Enterprise to simulate varying user loads. This helps EUC teams assess the system’s scalability after updates and ensures that the infrastructure can handle peak demands without performance degradation.
7. Reporting and Documentation: Generate comprehensive reports on the performance and user experience testing results. This documentation is valuable for translating business needs into additional budget for EUC professionals and can be used to communicate the readiness of updates to stakeholders, including regulatory bodies.

How to Ensure Compatibility and Uninterrupted Patient Care

Empowered by the robust capabilities of Login Enterprise, EUC teams in healthcare settings can effectively safeguard patients and providers from unnecessary downtime and interruption. By leveraging this advanced tool, EUC professionals gain the assurance that applying a patch to one system will seamlessly maintain compatibility with all interdependent systems it must interface with.

This not only fortifies the resilience of healthcare technology but also underscores the commitment to uninterrupted, high-quality patient care.

Want to see how Login Enterprise can support your EUC team and ensure you deliver exceptional virtual workspaces in healthcare settings? Watch our recent webinar on Eliminating Image Hassles and Ensuring Seamless Updates!