Valley Health


	Back		What is the VH Gateway? It's the new way to access your clinical applications. Information Sheet: VH Gateway – A Change to the Method of Remote Access Information Systems is changing the method of access to hospital applications from remote locations. This includes home and physician offices (both on and off campus). The solution incorporates a product called “Citrix” which is a program that allows Windows programs and databases to be run in a World Wide Web environment. The Advantages of Citrix - Single point of entry; - Less confusion (we will eventually sunset “Option 1”, “Option 2” and fat VPN[1]). - Same user experience, whether you are at home or in your office. - Will dovetail with the Single Sign-On. This involves the current IT project to streamline access using a single username and password. Single Sign-On won’t work at remote offices without Citrix. - Reduce problems and conflicts with remote PC settings (firewall settings, etc) - Will allow simultaneous access to VH applications and non-VH applications (using previous VPN solutions, once connected, a user could not use anything but VH apps) - New hospital applications can be added on the fly without making modifications at the remote location. - Reduced administration for the physician office’s technical resources The Dis-Advantages of Citrix - Double Login - The user will have to log into the “VH Gateway”, then into the application itself; our plan is for this to go away once Single Sign-On is available. [1] There will be special cases where fat VPN client will still be used, like home transcriptionists and vendor access. ------------------------------------------------ Additional Technical Information Two Main Points for using Citrix: As stated above, this solution is required for the acceptance of Single Sign-On. Once we rollout SSO in-house, physicians and staff will only be required to remember one username and one password, except for the SSO login. If Citrix is not implemented… all off campus users will need to remember all the current usernames and passwords since SSO does not control their remote desktops. The only way for SSO to function outside the walls of VHS is with Citrix; we control their virtual Citrix desktop into the hospital. This is a necessary first step. The new Physician Portal uses a Linux “cluster”; the portal is actually 3 Linux machines. The way we control access in-house, and spread the user load is by DNS round-robin. Since remote offices are not using our DNS servers, there is no way to load-balance their sessions. If we hard-code desktops to one specific Linux server, then they will be down when that particular server is being serviced or during a h/w failure. With Citrix, their user-session is running on our servers, which use in-house DNS and can do the load-balancing. ------------------------------------------------ Timeline for Citrix Rollout and New Physician Portal 10: November 7 – New Portal 10 Go-live (All VH Campus PCs point to Portal 10; link from new Portal 10 to old Portal 8) Around January 2 (When SSO Available) Old Portal 8 turned off