The new ‘Remote Virtual Desktop’ (RVD) service offered by Thorin to our Pharma clients, opens up a whole range of new opportunities. To trigger your mind, it is as if the user is actually working within a fully controlled environment, a kind of safe local network. That is, for example if you publish a document on the RVD, only authorized users will be able to read it, and even better, the documents is transmitted over a safe SSL connection. Things like disk access (so being able to save a document) or print access (again, being able to print a document) can be set for each user. So if you don’t want your sites to create uncontrolled copies of any of your documents, you just disable Printing and local disk access for the group of ‘Site’ users. You could also create different RVD’s for different groups of people in your study group. So that whenever a person logs in, he or she will see whatever they are allowed to see.
For a Sponsor this also opens up possiblities for branding or marketing. Any investigator using the RVD will see a completely personalized Desktop. Like his usual Windows desktop, but then completely dedicated for a given Study or Clinical trial. If you want your logo on the Desktop, no problem. If you want a product database on the Virtual Desktop, no problem. And again, it is as safe as if it was in your own LAN.
Similar to allowing iDataFax access without having to install the client software, you could also install things like a Citrix client. Whenever the user logs in, they can start the Citrix client from the RVD, and the Remote Virtual Desktop server (RVD-server) will make the connection to your Citrix server. So the RVD-server will never hold any clinical data. It only has one or more predefined Virtual Desktops and whenever a user wants to login, the VD-server will take a Virtual Desktop from its pool. And whenever the user logs out, the Virtual Desktop will simply be trashed.
And if you include a webserver on the RVD-server, you will be able to have things like a user adjusted Study Portal. So if a local Monitor, whether he/she uses the RVD from within your office or from a PC at the clinical site, he/she will get the same information through the Study Portal. And the information in the Study Portal is completely secured: the information is send over a safe connection and is geared towards that person. And in fact, different to most other secured information on a webserver, this webserver is not ‘on the internet’. Without Virtual Desktop, it doesn’t exists.
