Healthcare providers who work with patients every day know that there is nothing more important than getting them the treatment and care they need. Data is critical to this work, as accurate and timely patient data can be key to making the right healthcare decisions. Security and resiliency are crucial to healthcare technology: patient data and the applications used in healthcare settings must be kept secure and accessed only by authorized personnel. Keeping devices up and working as expected is especially important when patient care is involved.
Hospitals and medical facilities have long relied on traditional virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions to provide staff access to critical information and tools across facilities and locations, as well as safeguard patient, employee, and corporate data. VDI can help healthcare organizations to better manage their IT infrastructure, securely expand access to digital tools and data, and reduce costs. Organizations seeking VDI solutions can turn to Azure Virtual Desktop to help manage and maintain their IT needs.
Get started with Azure Virtual Desktop
For healthcare organizations looking for simplicity and to move beyond traditional VDI, Windows 365 is a cloud-based service that organizations can use to create Cloud PCs for your employees, contractors, or other users. Windows 365 allows IT admins to quickly and easily deploy Cloud PCs and to manage Cloud PCs alongside physical PCs within Microsoft Intune. Windows 365 provides the productivity, security, and collaboration benefits of Microsoft 365.
As healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, life sciences organizations, and more look to the future, Windows Cloud solutions from Microsoft provide virtualization solutions with the flexibility, scalability, and security of Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365.
Supporting healthcare and clinical workloads with Azure Virtual Desktop
Organizations looking for virtualization options have flexibility and control with Azure Virtual Desktop. It provides a secure, cost-effective way to support remote desktops and experiences from anywhere, across a variety of endpoints. Organizations throughout the healthcare industry use Azure Virtual Desktop to access clinical and productivity applications and hosted desktops when they need them. Azure Virtual Desktop is managed via the Microsoft Azure portal, allowing IT admins to create and manage a custom desktop virtualization environment to meet their organizations’ needs.
Among the core business applications for healthcare providers are electronic health records (EHR). One of the top EHR solutions used by healthcare providers worldwide is Epic. Microsoft and Epic are working closely with healthcare organizations that are interested in being early adopters of running Epic Hyperdrive on Azure Virtual Desktop. We are using feedback from these early production pilots to prioritize our product development roadmap and have assembled the emerging best practices into a draft reference architecture. For more info and to follow future progress, please see the Azure Virtual Desktop Exploratory Platform Summary on Epic’s UserWeb (login required).
Microsoft partner Imprivata also announced support for Azure Virtual Desktop on Windows endpoints in Virtual Kiosk and Shared Kiosk modes in November 2024, expanding its support beyond Azure Virtual Desktop on Linux devices. Imprivata solutions are often used by healthcare organizations to support “Tap and Go” badging capabilities with Azure Virtual Desktop virtual machines (VMs), so this expansion to Windows endpoints gives customers more options to configure their IT infrastructure to meet the needs of the healthcare workplace.
Azure Virtual Desktop is designed with flexibility and security in mind, with a number of components for customers to configure and implement in a way that meets their IT requirements. Additional recent updates include:
- Microsoft Intune Remote Help is expanding support beyond single session to also include the Azure Virtual Desktop multi-session capability, a significant milestone for IT admins managing shared virtual environments.
- Organizations have additional configuration options with Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI). Azure Local helps organizations meet performance or data locality needs, or support areas with poor connectivity to the Azure public cloud, by providing session hosts closer to their location or by extending deployment options to on-premises infrastructure. See Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD’s) recent publishing of results of its Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Local performance testing.
- Other updates include session host configuration and update, dynamic autoscaling, and Mobile Application Management (MAM) support
We continue to innovate and build Azure Virtual Desktop to meet the needs of organizations in healthcare. Visit the “What’s new in Azure Virtual Desktop?” page to learn more.
Desktops in the cloud with Windows 365
Some healthcare organizations may be looking for desktop virtualization options designed for easy deployment and management without significant VDI expertise or investment needed. Windows 365 is the Microsoft software as a service (SaaS) solution that provides end users with a familiar, personalized experience of Windows from anywhere, on any device. It becomes employees’ dedicated computer in the cloud, retaining their data, applications, and settings. Windows 365 Cloud PCs can be deployed and managed by the end user computing team alongside physical PCs using Intune.
For healthcare organizations, some of the most common use cases Cloud PCs are used for include healthcare administrators, pharmacy and life science workers, call-center employees, and more. Windows 365 also provides flexibility for IT teams to quickly deploy and scale up or down the virtual desktops as needed, making it a great option for part-time or seasonal workers, or short-term contractors. Windows 365 Enterprise provides dedicated and personalized Cloud PCs to employees, enabling them to access their desktop in the Microsoft Cloud from any device, 24/7.
Recent releases in Windows 365 offer even more options for healthcare organizations looking to expand access and build resiliency for their organization:
- For organizations looking to expand access to Cloud PCs across a greater number of employees, Windows 365 Frontline allows one license to be shared by multiple users, one at a time, based on how the Cloud PCs are configured. In dedicated mode, three users will each have access to a personalized Cloud PC to be used during their shifts or working hours. In the shared mode, now generally available, a Frontline Cloud PC can be shared among a group of users on an intermittent basis, with a non-personalized experience. To learn more about Frontline plans, visit the Learn page.
- Some teams or individuals require additional backup, data resiliency, or disaster recovery options. In addition to the Windows 365 Cross-region Disaster Recovery add-on, Microsoft will soon be releasing Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus. This new add-on will provide quick recovery times and fully reserved capacity, independent of availability, helping to ensure fast and reliable recovery in an alternate region. This can be particularly important for healthcare organizations with additional regulatory or business requirements, including needs for greater geographic diversity, restore time objectives, and pre-allocated capacity. To read more about Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus, please visit the blog announcement.
To learn more about the features and capabilities within Windows 365, please visit What’s new in Windows 365.
Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop help organizations enhance productivity, stay secure, and reduce costs
Organizations around the world are seeing the benefits of adopting Windows Cloud solutions. For many healthcare organizations, the focus is on how deploying these solutions can boost productivity, lower IT costs, and strengthen security in a scalable and balanced approach.
The New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ of Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop, a 2025 study conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Microsoft to assess the benefits organizations can achieve with Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop, found a projected return on investment (ROI) ranging from 94% to 217%, with a net present value (NPV) between USD3.2 million and USD7.4 million over three years for a composite organization with 2,000 employees. The study also determined that employees and contractors using Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop save 6 to 12 minutes per day from avoided outages and latency compared to their previous environments. This translates to significant productivity gains, allowing healthcare organizations to optimize the efficiency of their workforce.
To explore more insights, read the Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting.
Learn more about empowering your healthcare teams with Windows Cloud solutions
Microsoft is committed to listening to our customers in healthcare and innovating to meet their needs. Organizations like Baptist Health are seeing cost and time savings by moving their clinical workloads onto Azure Virtual Desktop. Get connected by joining the Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, or Microsoft Intune Tech Communities.
Interested in learning more about Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop? Visit the Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop pages.
*Epic is a trademark of Epic Systems corporation.
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