Jens Koegler, Healthcare Industry Director EMEA
If ever the world needed a super-efficient and functioning healthcare system, it is now. It is being tested like never before and things are going to get worse before they get better. But this is not the forum for sensationalist headlines. Nor the time. Right now, we must look at ways that the healthcare sector can best cope with this crisis and what we can do to help it.
Certainly, IT has a role to play and IT must be on the front line to understand where problems arise. It must ensure secure operations under all circumstances and that critical information is quickly made available where it is needed. For example, it is essential to be able to provide information on where intensive care beds or medical equipment are available. The healthcare system is preparing for the worst in terms of scaling-up capacity in locations (halls, events rooms etc.) so network infrastructure has to be set up quickly, access to systems in the data center has to be established, and devices have to be able to access data in locations that were never designed to cope with this requirement.
IT must also remain accessible to clinical staff in order to adopt and implement new, short-term changes. For those in the hospitals, rights management must be adapted with the onboarding of numerous new users and provide access at very short notice. Those that can work remotely, like administrative staff, should and they should be supported by devices and new applications where necessary.
However, it is of paramount importance that security must not be compromised. The sad truth is that that current emergency situation is being exploited by cyber criminals. E-mails perfectly camouflaged as official government letters, rotate with alleged Covid-19 instructions that are nothing more than disguised viruses and Trojans, are rotating. The attackers hope that the hospital staff will make mistakes. This is what happened in the Czech Republic where a hospital was shut down for almost a week.
The help is here, and now
We must work together to overcome this crisis and IT teams in the hospitals are now in need of our support.
We have solutions to help. Our application professionals can provide tools to quickly develop and deploy the apps that are needed. Dashboards have been developed over the last few days to quickly capture vital data and make it transparent. There are also good examples of mobile apps that are provided free of charge to make this information available. Our end-user experts can help reduce the onboarding process and provisioning of additional virtual desktops and remote workstations. Our data center specialists can provide additional capacity. Our security experts can develop solutions to ensure absolute and intrinsic data security, while our network specialists can set up secure structures in the shortest possible time and distribute the load across the system so that the most critical applications have the highest priority.
We need to get the right information to the right people at the right time to save lives. The International Red Cross relies on VMware when reliable and secure networks need to be set up quickly in crisis areas. Usually that happens elsewhere, but now we need those same capabilities here. For all of us.
Please talk to us directly or visit here for more details on keeping your vital operations and resources running.
Head of Healthcare VMware UK
@jeramiesutton1
Head of Public Healthcare VMware Germany
Head of Healthcare VMware France
@JPhDelaye