The digital workplace — and especially application management — within healthcare organisations is becoming increasingly complex. NHS trusts and other healthcare providers are dealing with a growing number of (often heavy) applications, hybrid IT environments, mergers, and stricter requirements around security and availability.
By separating applications from the operating system — often referred to as application layering or portability — many of these challenges can be addressed. In this article, we highlight three practical use cases of Liquidware’s FlexApp, based on real-world challenges and insights from healthcare environments.
A typical hospital environment can easily involve hundreds of applications — from EPR systems to laboratory platforms and imaging tools. Traditional installation and management approaches simply don’t scale.
With FlexApp, applications are decoupled from the underlying platform and OS, allowing them to be managed as independent layers. Updates can be delivered near real time, without having to rebuild base images or maintain different processes for physical, virtual and cloud environments.
This was also the case for a University hospital. Their digital workplace is highly complex, with a mix of physical desktops and laptops alongside virtual and cloud-based desktops. Delivering applications consistently across these platforms was time-consuming and required multiple solutions, leading to a high management overhead — a common challenge across healthcare organisations.
Their Team Manager End-User Computing: We wanted to significantly improve efficiency in managing our workplace environment. At the same time, Microsoft App-V was reaching end-of-life, so we needed an alternative strategy that would work across all our workplace types and support future changes. We found that in Liquidware’s solutions.”
Many clinical applications were never designed for modern cloud or VDI environments. They often rely on specific runtime environments, only run on certain OS versions, or conflict with other applications.
With FlexApp, complex or legacy applications can be delivered as containers, without impacting the underlying system. This allows organisations to continue using critical applications within a modern workplace strategy.
A good example comes from a large hospital that chose to move away from an on-premises virtual desktop towards a combination of local Windows 11 workstations and an Azure Virtual Desktop environment. Based on user personas, employees are assigned either a local or virtual workspace.
Their previous on-premises management tools were not suitable for this new setup. Additionally, Ivanti Workspace Control was approaching end-of-life and needed to be replaced. After a testing phase, the hospital selected a combination of Intune and Liquidware solutions (FlexApp and ProfileUnity) to manage both environments, ensuring flexibility, scalability and efficiency.
The Infrastructure Manager of this hospital:
“Our goal is to support healthcare professionals as effectively as possible in their daily work, while taking into account persona-based requirements. We are moving away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach and providing tailored workspaces for different user types. This is only possible with an efficient management solution, which we found in Liquidware. The migration itself was also a key part of the project, and Liquidware not only simplified the transition but also made our workplace more secure, flexible and personalised.”
Healthcare environments rely heavily on shared devices and flexible staffing models — including rotating staff, trainees and temporary workers. Users need to log in quickly on any device, without losing their personal settings, rights, printers or application preferences.
FlexApp enables applications to be assigned dynamically per user, without requiring reboots or lengthy installations. Combined with ProfileUnity, user profiles are also decoupled from the underlying platform. Instead of being tied to a device, user settings follow the individual user.
ProfileUnity also enables contextual configuration, allowing settings to be applied dynamically based on role, location, time, device type or other conditions. This not only improves user experience, but also enhances flexibility and security.
One example comes from a mental healthcare organisation:
“We previously worked with a Citrix environment where users were accustomed to seeing their own workspace — with their own settings and applications — wherever and whenever they logged in. We wanted to maintain that experience in our new environment, which is why we chose ProfileUnity and FlexApp from Liquidware.”
Many healthcare organisations face similar challenges when it comes to managing the digital workplace. Liquidware has supported a wide range of healthcare providers — both acute and community care — in simplifying and modernising their application and workspace management with FlexApp.
Want to learn more or see it in action? Get in touch for a demo.