New Survey: Adoption of Desktop Virtualization in Healthcare in EMEA to Outpace U.S.

In August, Imprivata published its 2013 Desktop Virtualization Trends in Healthcare report, the company’s third-annual survey about the adoption rates and benefits of desktop virtualization (as well as cloud-based applications and services) in healthcare.

That study focused exclusively on the U.S. healthcare industry and yielded some interesting findings, especially with respect to year-over-year trends. As VMworld^® Europe kicks off in Barcelona, Spain, Imprivata wanted to explore these topics for the EMEA market as well, and today we announced the results of a follow-on study titled 2013 Desktop Virtualization Trends in Healthcare: A Global Perspective.

The survey of healthcare IT decision makers in the U.K., Netherlands, France, Germany and other countries provided insight into how the EMEA healthcare market is thinking about desktop virtualization, especially with respect to Server Hosted Virtual Desktops (SHVD) such as VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenDesktop.

According to the study, 57 percent of U.S. respondents indicate that their organization uses SHVD today, compared to 42 percent in EMEA. This was no surprise, but what was eye-opening was the forecast: SHVD usage is expected to increase 74 percent in EMEA over the next 24 months (as compared to an expected increase of 25 percent in the U.S.). Based on this forecast, usage of SHVD in healthcare in EMEA is expected to surpass usage of SHVD in healthcare in the U.S. in that timeframe.

Similarly, the use of thin and zero clients for SHVD is far more common in the U.S. than in EMEA today, but rate of adoption of these technologies in EMEA is expected to substantially outpace adoption in the U.S. significantly over the next 24 months. Based on respondents’ forecasts, the use of thin and zero clients for SHVD in EMEA is expected to equal usage in the U.S. within the next 12 months. 

These trends support the feedback we continue to receive from our global customers, and although the U.S. healthcare industry is far more regulated than in other regions, the need to improve convenience and simplify technology for clinicians for better focus on patient care is universal. Desktop virtualization helps healthcare organizations meet these requirements and the findings of this survey indicate that SHVD especially stands to be one of the more important emerging technology trends across the global healthcare community.

If you are attending VMworld in Barcelona this week, we invite you to visit Imprivata’s booth (E502) to discuss the findings of this study in more detail as well as to see a demonstration of our leading single sign-on (SSO) and authentication management solutions for delivering fast, secure No Click Access^® to clinical applications on virtual desktops.