Improving Healthcare Efficiency With Azure Virtual Desktop

The image of a doctor focused on a computer rather than the patient during a visit has become an enduring depiction on how technology can interrupt the valuable face time needed in healthcare.

Earlier this month, during the 2025 ViVE conference in Nashville, Tenn., providers and technology vendors gathered to discuss how to mitigate such issues, and perhaps even return back to patient care time now spent clicking through devices. Many solutions involved emerging use cases for artificial intelligence, but others touted strengthening foundational strategies first.

CDW Healthcare Strategist Josh Peacock moderated a conversation between Jim Bilsky, vice president of enterprise IT operations at Jacksonville, Fla.-based Baptist Health, and Tim Gray, lead health innovation officer and senior industry adviser for global healthcare at Microsoft, about how the large healthcare organization leveraged Azure Virtual Desktop to address long app login times and manual software setups.

From left: CDW Healthcare Strategist Josh Peacock moderates a discussion with Jim Bilsky, vice president of enterprise IT operations at Baptist Health, and Tim Gray, lead health innovation officer and senior industry adviser for global healthcare at Microsoft, during the ViVE 2025 conference in Nashville, Tenn.

Baptist Health has more than 14,000 team members and hundreds of points of care, including outpatient surgery centers, specialty clinics and more. It also offers telehealth and at-home care services. Amid a move to an Epic electronic health record system, Bilsky said, the organization wanted to eliminate barriers to accessing devices, whether at the bedside or in other locations.

“It was about taking time out of dealing with the tech to give the time back to providers to spend directly with the patients, who are why we’re here every day,” he said.

Leveraging Azure Virtual Desktop, Bilsky said, cut 30 seconds out of the device-accessing experience for clinicians, which returned about 17,000 minutes a week back to patient care.

Reducing the time spent on tapping in and out of devices also lessened stress for patients. Imagine a scenario in which a patient is already anxious about hearing a diagnosis, Peacock said. A clinician prolonging that silence by fiddling with a device will only worsen anxiety.

Using Azure Virtual Desktop, this approach lays the right foundation for other solutions, Gray noted, because a user’s day starts with logging in to a device, and that’s especially true when workers operate in a remote environment.

Following the rollout, Bilsky said, he turned in his laptop and works from an AVD device. His team has been shifting from a straight computing device to a thin client.

“My CISO is happy because the data never leaves. I don’t have a device to secure and worry about losing at the airport,” he said. “From a disaster recovery perspective in Jacksonville, we have hurricanes. So, if we want to send our contact center folks home for remote, their experience is exactly the same as when they’re on-premises. They’re just now connected at a different location.”

The goal is to “viciously standardize and automate everything” so that the work experience is predictable, Bilsky said. Stronger security has been an added benefit; large-scale patching, for example, doesn’t intrude into workflows as it once did.

There’s also been a shift in dollars and annual cost savings with Azure local and cloud. Bilsky said the ability to push workloads to the cloud as needed has helped to manage spending.

“The technology shouldn’t be the challenge,” Bilsky said. “If we can remove the endpoint from the equation and just have the experience be the clinical experience, then it does a great job at doing that.”

Healthcare organizations interested in undertaking such a project have the support they need if they want it, Gray added. Working with a partner may even open some built-in entitlements such as workshops and even funding initiatives for virtualization.