Diversicare Reduces Healthcare IT Footprint and Lowers Costs with IGEL

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 5, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- IGEL, a world leader in endpoint management software for the secure enterprise, today announced that Diversicare, a premier provider of post-acute care headquartered in Brentwood, Tenn., has selected the IGEL UD Pocket and the IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS) to support the roll-out of its Citrix virtualization solutions and the consolidation of its Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems.

"Working with tight operating margins, Healthcare providers must continually find ways to improve their level of service to remain competitive," said Simon Clephan, Vice President of Business Development, IGEL. "This often necessitates a refresh of IT technology and a resultant uptick in costs. At a time when overall operational budgets are under pressure, IGEL can help, by providing a secure, consistent user experience at the endpoint – one that contributes greatly to quality of care."

Shift to Virtualization Leads to Endpoint Facelift
In 2017, Diversicare began planning a transition from legacy, outdated equipment – notably fat clients – to a companywide, virtualized desktop environment, deploying thin clients. The company had recently acquired 22 centers which were already on a Citrix VDI platform and had a version of thin clients in use. April Marbury, Diversicare's CIO, and Shanna Persful, the organization's Director of IT Operations, began looking for an endpoint solution that could integrate with Citrix, was turnkey and could enable integration and standardization across a total of 76 centers, in 10 states.

"Margins are tight, so we need to be creative about using technology to ensure the productivity of our skilled nursing staff.  We have to continue to find new ways to move the dial without adding IT resources and containing IT spend," said Marbury.

Diversicare began deploying IGEL in October 2017, and estimates its savings for the first year to be $635,000 – more than half of which will come from eliminating new hardware costs, and the remainder from reduced expenditures on third-party software licensing. Security and simplicity of transition were also key factors in Diversicare's decision making process. "We acquire a new center and literally at midnight we make the switch to Diversicare's IT infrastructure. The switch has to be fast, secure and seamless," added Marbury. 

To add to the complexity of adding new facilities, Diversicare was also moving from two clinical Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems to one. Working in a distributed model across 76 centers, with kiosks and nursing stations, the healthcare staff needed active daily living (ADL) patient information at their fingertips, without any delays. The Citrix and thin client solution had to be able to provide nursing staff with a consistent, efficient, secure user experience – to enable optimum quality of care.

Overnight Deployment Capabilities and IGEL Linux Standardization Key Factors
Diversicare ultimately made the decision to deploy the IGEL UD Pocket and the IGEL UMS because they needed a software-defined solution that could literally be deployed overnight and move the company quickly into a standardized endpoint environment.  "Repurposing the old hardware gave us exactly what we needed, at each center, even with many devices to deploy we were in and out within 30 minutes. The shift was basically transparent to the end users; and, for IT, created a single, homogeneous desktop landscape that is easy to manage with a simple drag and drop interface," said Persful.

To read the Diversicare Case Study with IGEL, visit https://www.igel.com/resources/igel-success-story-diversicare/.

To experience the capabilities of the IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS), download here, or request free evaluation hardware.

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About IGEL
IGEL delivers powerful unified endpoint management software that is revolutionary in its simplicity and purpose-built for the enterprise. The company's world-leading software products include the IGEL OS™, Universal Desktop Converter™ (UDC), IGEL Cloud Gateway™ (ICG), IGEL UD Pocket™ (UDP) and Universal Management Suite™ (UMS). These solutions enable a more secure, manageable and cost-effective endpoint management platform across nearly any x86 device. Additionally, IGEL's German engineered and manufactured thin, zero and all-in-one client solutions deliver the industry's best warranty (5 years), support (3 years after end of life) and management functionality. IGEL enables enterprises to precisely control all devices running IGEL OS as well as Windows OS from a single dashboard interface. IGEL has offices worldwide and is represented by partners in over 50 countries. For more information on IGEL, visit www.igel.com.

SOURCE IGEL

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