Remote Display Performance for Wireless Healthcare Computing

Organizations are beginning to recognize that health care providers are highly mobile and optimal care requires providing access to a large and dynamic body of information wherever the provider and patient are. Remote display protocols (RDP) are one way that organizations are using to deliver healthcare applications to mobile users. While many organizations have begun to use RDPs to deliver real-time access to health care information to clinicians, little formal work has been done to evaluate the performance or the effectiveness of thin-client computing with health care applications. This study examines the performance of wireless thin-client tablets with two web-based clinical applications, a text-centric, graphics-poor EMR and a graphic-rich image analysis program. The study compares the performance of two popular RDP implementations, Citrix and Microsoft Remote Desktop, with the performance of a traditional web browser in a wireless environment. For both applications, the RDPs demonstrated both higher speed and reduced bandwidth requirements than the web browser.