PC blades get clean bill of health

Northwestern Memorial Physicians Group has decided that patients and traditional PCs just don't mix in the exam rooms at its clinics.

On one hand, medical workers for the Chicago-area healthcare collective need fast access to patient data in exam rooms. On the other, the organization fears that outfitting the rooms with full-fledged PCs could result in data or computer theft, create awkward PC support situations and even result in contaminants dispersed by a PC's fan in the presence of a sick patient.

Those are among the issues behind NMPG's decision to yank noisy PCs out of exam rooms and replace them with devices called PC blades, which fit into a central rack, such as server and other blades. The healthcare outfit installed 149 PC blades and plans to get 30 more up and running this month.

The twist is that these systems, from ClearCube, are divvied up so that the monitor, keyboard and mouse are in the exam rooms (they're linked via a small box called a port, which connects to the LAN), but the CPU, memory and disk drives are in telecom closets or medical supply rooms.

"One of the reasons we didn't want to put traditional PCs in the exam rooms was security," says Guy Fuller, manager of IT. "We didn't want the physicians walking out of the room and having a patient take a PC with them when they left. Conversely, we didn't want to lock down the PC, because it would affect the physician/patient experience."

Making the switch also involved an economic decision.

"I didn't want to send a technician into a room to replace a PC while a doctor was performing a procedure on a patient. We see patients at 15-minute intervals, and we can't afford any downtime," Fuller says.

He estimates that over a four-year period the company will save as much as $300,000 for every 100 ClearCube-bladed PCs. For every 15 minutes a computer is down in an exam room and a physician can't provide care, NMPG would lose $150 in revenue, Fuller says.

Fuller and his associates are responsible for maintaining, configuring and installing servers and workstations at NMPG's nine satellite medical clinics. They use the ClearCube Management Suite.

"We don't want to visit a clinic if we can help it," he says. "At a later date, we'll schedule a visit to the clinic to add a new, spare blade."

NMPG has measured some solid benefits from making its PC swap. The organization reduced the number of hours spent upgrading and patching PCs by 57% - from 200 hours to 86 hours - since the PCs can be administered, managed and failed over remotely. The outfit slashed the number of hours spent supporting PCs by 75%, and user downtime fell from 280 to 87 hours.

Installing bladed PCs at NMPG had its challenges. Fuller and his staff had to retrofit rooms, which also held medical supplies, bandages and patient charts, to deal with such issues as the heat generated by the back end of the ClearCube systems.

"The building management won't allow me to exhaust through the plenum," Fuller says, referring to the space above the ceiling. "To put extra cooling on the roof would cost hundreds of thousands dollars, so that isn't realistic." He has installed portable cooling in some rooms or vented the heat into other places.