One of the top-ranked pediatric hospitals in the country, Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) uses integrated Citrix solutions to maximize patient care, improve clinician efficiency and achieve complete redundancy in its IT infrastructure.
Consistently ranked one of the top pediatric facilities in the United States, Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) provides care to more than 100,000 children each year through its 300-plus-bed hospital and its 14 outpatient centers in the greater Los Angeles area.
The more than 100-year-old institution is also one of the country’s top teaching facilities, serving as training ground for aspiring pediatricians from University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.
The Challenge: Ensuring high performance and stability through an updated IT infrastructure
Although CHLA started small—admitting just 14 patients in its first year—the hospital has grown with the populace, and its urban campus now occupies more than 10 acres in the heart of Los Angeles. In 2011, CHLA implemented a Citrix-based desktop and application virtualization environment to support the new 460,000-square-foot Marion and John E. Anderson Pavilion for inpatient care.
The implementation of Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop and single sign-on provided clinicians with quick, easy access to their desktops and applications on any device, without having to wait for lengthy boot, login, and logoff processes. However, the time savings provided by this virtualized environment began to erode as the load increased on the system with the addition of 41 ambulatory clinics, resulting in nearly 400 additional remote users over the course of two years.
Without adequate capacity to support the additional workers or a fully redundant architecture to support failover and maintenance processes, the environment slowed to a crawl and maintenance became a nightmare. After suffering a system outage near the end of 2013, CHLA turned to Redondo Beach–based IT consultancy T2 Technology Group for help.
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