Dell is moving quickly to expand its services capabilities in the wake of its $3.9 billion purchase of Perot Systems, rolling out a health care solution designed to make it easier for hospital personnel to quickly access patient medical records.
Dell is unveiling its MCC (Medical Clinical Computing) offering, a virtualized desktop environment that gives health care professionals access patient information and applications from any device in the hospital.
The goal of the offering, announced Nov. 18, is to lessen the amount of time these professionals spend trying to find that right device that has the data they are looking for. Instead, doctors and other health care workers can get onto any device-including desktops, laptops, handheld devices and thin clients-and access the centrally stored information and applications.
The MCC offering also brings other benefits to desktop virtualization, including greater security and easier manageability of the information and applications that are centrally located in the data center, according to Dell officials.
In this way, the information can be locked in the data center, and hospitals go from managing devices to managing user “digital identities”-including user privileges, profiles and preferences.
“It’s not enough to digitize patient information. We must make it available to medical professionals at the point of care, whether that’s in a hospital or in an affiliated physician practice,” Jamie Coffin, vice president of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences, said in a statement. “Dell is focused on transforming [healthcare IT] to harness the power of information across our healthcare system to better coordinate and improve patient care and reduce its cost.”
As part of the MCC solution, Dell helps design, implement and manage the virtual desktop environment, and offers services from integrating servers, clients and software to training and support. In addition, Dell will manage and host customers.
Dell is making a big push into IT services, which is dominated by the likes of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, which just absorbed EDS-which it bought in 2008 for $13.9 billion-into what is now called HP Enterprise Services. Dell’s Perot acquisition in September will be a key driver for the company’s service push. Healthcare was among the key verticals served by Perot.