**Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from the Digital Issue, “Virtualizing Desktops in the Cloud,” which is available for download from Channel Partners Cloud Insights .**

By Randy Jeter

Hospice of Citrus County Inc. (HoCC) serves patients with life-limiting illnesses or life expectance of less than six months. HoCC is based in Lecanto, Fla., with 12 branches in the northern half of the state. Its team of physicians, nurses, home health aides, social workers, chaplains and trained volunteers provides specialized medical care, emotional, spiritual and social support, as well as medical services, equipment, supplies, medications and training to manage patient care.

The Challenge

To meet government requirements for managing patient records electronically, HoCC needed to refresh its technology, increase its network security and streamline IT management and help desk support.

HOCC’s three-person IT team handled all activities supporting the IT infrastructure and user desktop image delivery. These activities included ordering new hardware, repairing existing hardware, monitoring the servers for performance and managing the backup process. However, the department did not have a management and tracking system in place, so employees were not receiving efficient and reliable service.

In addition, the organization’s private network needed to be monitored and managed.

The Solution

As part of its efforts to refresh its core health care systems and streamline its desktop solution, HoCC moved 400 client terminals, located across its offices, to RapidScales CloudDesktop platform. The new desktops-as-a-service (DaaS) solution was built in a private environment to assure HIPAA compliance.

RapidScale also worked closely with HoCCs COO and IT team to develop a plan for transitioning HOCC’s services and setting up a teaming approach to support end users. As part of that effort, RapidScale implemented a help desk solution, enabling a single point of contact for support issues. Incoming calls are handled with a defined process, issues are tracked and on-site resources are dispatched to address desktop issues.

RapidScale also provided HoCC with a system for administrating IT hardware acquisitions.

The Result

HoCC relies on RapidScale as its single point of integration, managing regulatory compliance and IT costs.

By implementing RapidScales CloudDesktop service, HOCC now provides its staff and contractors with a secure cloud desktop platform, which also has boosted its employee productivity and workload efficiency, and enabled a mobile workforce. With RapidScale handling the desktop experience, HoCC also has reduced desktop management costs and prolonged the user-terminal device life cycle.

In addition, HoCC streamlined order management, trouble ticketing and end-user support systems by offloading to RapidScale. And, by monitoring all activities in a quantitative manner, overall support costs were reduced.

Randy J. Jeter is the CEO and co-founder of RapidScale Inc., a full-service cloud provider. It is his goal to eliminate the personal computer by using his company’s CloudDesktop solution to make people’s mobile devices their computers.
Twitter: @randy_jeter
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/randyjeter