Citrix + Unicon + Imprivata: Streamlining Healthcare Access with One Tap

n episode 188 of The Citrix Session, host Bill Sutton and solutions architect Randy Price dive into how healthcare IT leaders are simplifying clinician access and improving patient care through the power of Citrix, Unicon ELUX OS, and Imprivata integration.

They unpack how Citrix’s acquisition of Unicon delivers secure, centralized endpoint management with Scout, and how Imprivata’s “tap and go” authentication enhances speed, security, and user experience. From architecture insights to real-world use cases, this episode explores why seconds matter in healthcare and how Citrix’s end-to-end ecosystem empowers IT teams and clinicians alike.

🎧 Key Topics:

• The Unicon ELUX OS and Scout Enterprise management
• Integrating Imprivata for tap-and-go authentication
• Entitlement and cost efficiencies under Citrix Platform Licensing
• Improving clinician workflows and patient outcomes through secure, fast access

Perfect for: Healthcare IT professionals, Citrix admins, and EUC enthusiasts looking to enhance security and simplify access at the endpoint level.

Transcript

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Bill Sutton: Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 188 of the Citrix session. I am your host, Bill Sutton, the Director of Modern Workspace at Zentegra. I have a member of the team here, Randy Price. Randy, you want to say hello and introduce yourself, tell everyone about you?

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Randy.Price: Sure, sure. Hey everyone, Rady Price. I'm a solutions architect that, reports to Bill. I'm part of the Modern Workspace team, focusing on EUC solutions.

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Randy.Price: like I said last time, a lot of experience in Citrix, been using it for 20-plus years at this point, so… good to be here.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, but Randy sells himself… he always sells himself short. He's got a lot of expertise in other UC vendors, as well as a lot of the ecosystem, you know, like Control Up and Liquid Wear and things like that, so…

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Bill Sutton: So today, on topic for today is a blog article published September 30th. It's entitled, One Tap, Zero Complexity, Why Healthcare IT Leaders Are Embracing Unicon Plus Imprivata.

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Bill Sutton: It's written by Philip Beckler. Philip is the former CEO of Unicon, and is now a Senior Director or VP, I believe, at Citrix, over that business… the Unicon business unit.

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Bill Sutton: So, for those of you who aren't familiar with what Unicon is, I think probably, Brandi, it might be a good idea to give a quick primer.

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Bill Sutton: On what Unicon is and who's entitled to it. So Unicon, as an organization, has been around about 30 years or so, or more. And they have, the Unicon LEC, ELUX, that's E-L-U-X,

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Bill Sutton: OS, which is an endpoint operating system that, when they were acquired back in January of 2025 by Citrix.

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Bill Sutton: They have deployed it to more than 2.5 million endpoints across multiple countries.

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Bill Sutton: Including a couple of large-scale financial services customers with 300,000-plus endpoint devices. So, I personally, I had not heard of them, before this acquisition, but they're definitely not a startup. Been around for a long time and have a lot of,

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Bill Sutton: a lot of presence in organizations around the world. Many of those organizations are running Citrix on the back end and leveraging the Uticon Elux OS to access the Citrix environment, but it obviously works with other environments as well.

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Bill Sutton: Randy, any other… any other thoughts there? You want to maybe talk a little bit more about the architecture, you know, the management concepts and that sort of thing?

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Randy.Price: Sure. To your point, right, Elux is the thin OS operating system. From a management capability, it's, centralized management, the solution's called Scout.

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Randy.Price: So, Scout Enterprise. You know, and from that perspective, there's really two ways to manage it. They've got a Windows application you can use, however, everything's sort of transitioning over to what they call Scout Board, which is their web-based management console.

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Randy.Price: There is a SQL component from a database perspective. However, just know that there is the capability, right, from a management perspective to not only manage both internal devices as well as external through what they call their Scout Cloud Gateway, which is basically an appliance that you deploy in your DMZ to allow remote management of external devices. So, they really got it kind of covered both from an internal versus

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Randy.Price: external use case, regardless of when those endpoints reside, and having the capability to manage those from a centralized location, right? So, and that includes configuration, right? Support, the ability to mirror those devices from a troubleshooting perspective.

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Randy.Price: It's, it's…

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Bill Sutton: How do you lay down an image, Randy?

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Randy.Price: So, they have a solution, so within that, right, there's a solution called Elias. Elias, is their image… I'll call it their image management, right, solution, in the sense that you'll go and download a collection of packages, from the… today it's myunicon.com, right? But you'll go out, you'll download those packages,

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Randy.Price: You'll pick what applications that you want installed on your image.

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Randy.Price: And you'll generate that image, right? So when you click an application, let's say you want Citrix Workspace App, you'll actually pull Citrix Works Workspace App over in Elias into an image that you're creating, tell it to solve, it'll go grab all the dependencies and create that image for you, and then within Scout Board, you can assign that image to the endpoints that you want to utilize it. Gives you full configuration as well, so you can go in from a device and application management perspective to configure

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Randy.Price: you know, all of the things that you would typically configure for Citrix Workspace app, you know, redirection of USB devices, you know, authentication, which I think we're talking about here specifically with improv integration, all of that is configurable within Scout Board as well.

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Randy.Price: So…

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Bill Sutton: Yep, so like Randy alluded to just then, we are talking today about the integration of Imprivata into the Yukon… Yukon… into the Unicon.

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Randy.Price: into the Unicom platform.

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Bill Sutton: So, really where this comes down to is a lot of organizations, healthcare organizations, leverage Citrix virtual apps and desktops, Citrix DAS, and Imprivata, to enable easy and quick access to their… to the environments for clinicians. Obviously.

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Bill Sutton: CVAD and DAS deliver a really solid experience for clinicians with Imprivata handling single sign-on and multi-factor authentication. So, like Randy alluded to, the Imprivata is an authentication provider that enables what's often referred to in healthcare, and I've seen this myself.

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Bill Sutton: As tap and go, a healthcare provider walks up to a… to a device.

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Bill Sutton: They tap their… their badge, typically the badge that they use to get into the, you know, through the building access system. Not always, but in many cases, the same badge. They'll tap that onto a card reader of some sort. There's also other ways to do it. They can use proximity and things of that nature. But they tap into it, it immediately

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Bill Sutton: Logs them into the environment, and presents their clinical application, their EHR, their electronic health record application.

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Bill Sutton: And then they, they start, you know, taking notes and

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Bill Sutton: delivering care to patients, and then when they're done, they tap… basically tap and walk away, and it essentially, creates a disconnected session in Citrix Parlance, that's sitting there waiting for the next time they click the card or another device, in which case it comes right back.

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Bill Sutton: There are some organizations that still rely on

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Bill Sutton: The old approach of entering a username and password, and obviously, that's… most hospital organizations, healthcare organizations, want to try to improve patient care and reduce the amount of time you spend accessing systems and spend more of that time on patient care, so…

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Bill Sutton: Unicon with, with Imprivata helps this, so it's not really a technical issue, it's really more of a…

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Bill Sutton: a true business problem, because, again, you don't want your clinician spending all the time trying to access the systems and work within the systems. You want to, you want to make that as efficient as possible so that they can get, they can get in and out quickly, and move on to the next patient. Any thoughts around that, Brandi, at this point?

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Randy.Price: No, I was gonna say, you know, you're exactly right. That's typically, you know, one of the first statement in this blog post, right, says, you know, seconds matter, and in healthcare, they truly do, right? So, you know, we were talking about patient care, you know, there's different, you know, varying factors here at play, but

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Randy.Price: in reality, seconds do matter in some extreme cases, right? We're talking about life and death, so having the capability to log in very quickly, get what you need access to. And that's been some of the challenges that I think that a lot of healthcare organizations have expressed, is

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Randy.Price: you know, long login times, having to remember multiple passwords, especially as we start adding password complexity as well, right? So, having the capability to have something that I possess.

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Randy.Price: Being able to go up, tap, log in very quickly, like you said, log out, and just focus more on patient care than having to focus on, you know, some of these more technical aspects really helps improve, you know, not only the… from a clinician standpoint, but also the patient experience as well, so…

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Bill Sutton: Exactly, yeah.

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Bill Sutton: So, one of the things… one of the ways that Unicon improves healthcare is, obviously, leveraging the Unicon ELUX OS… gosh, excuse me, the Unicon ELUX OS means that there's less footprint on the endpoint. It's a pretty…

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Bill Sutton: a thin-down Linux-based operating system that runs on the endpoint. But the… one of the key things is if you are a current

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Bill Sutton: Citrix customer with the right licensing, which is pretty much anybody that's renewed within the past, what, 2 years, a year and a half now? You own it. You own it. If you have Universal Hybrid multi-cloud or the Citrix Platform License, then you own licenses for Elux and… and Scout.

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Bill Sutton: Our Scout Board. So the endpoint operating system and the management framework. So, it's available to customers. Really, what

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Bill Sutton: What you really need is to get the improvada

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Bill Sutton: the improv licensing, if you don't already have it, and get that laid into the ELUX OS. Obviously this… this is pretty straightforward, and something that we at Centegra can help you with.

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Bill Sutton: But there's, you know, nothing additional is needed, nothing new. You don't have… you have to obviously acquire the Improvada licenses, but there's no new licensing required on the ELUX or anything along those lines to enable access to Improvada running on ELUX. So…

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Bill Sutton: By consolidating the endpoint with Unicon, you gain a number of things along with Imprivata. Like Randy was talking about, accelerated clinician access. So, we mentioned tap and go and fast user. We'll talk about the next couple of topics there, Randy. Strong security and operational simplicity.

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Randy.Price: Yeah, I'll just say, right, so again, to that point.

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Randy.Price: you know, if you're a Citrus customer, you have this entitlement, and so, especially in healthcare, right, having the capability to

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Randy.Price: you know, reduce the number of different vendors that you're having to, you know, support in that sense, right? To where we're not having these siloed vendors that you have based upon the different stacks.

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Randy.Price: having the solution that's provided end-to-end that you're getting from Citrix in this sort of use case, both the endpoint as well as the virtual apps or desktops that you're providing, having that one model where you're, you know, if there is an issue, right, you can call that vendor and have support from a support perspective.

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Bill Sutton: Right.

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Randy.Price: But, you know, again, the strong security aspect, it's a thin client OS, right? So it's a hardened Linux read-only OS that you're delivering from a security perspective. You know, it helps as far as delivering things like security updates and keeping those updated. Using a traditional Windows endpoint.

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Randy.Price: you know, that's always been the challenge, you know, keeping up with the Microsoft patches and the other apps that are running there, right? And then we have, you know, AV and malware and all these other sort of solutions that are running on that. Having a thin client, read-only OS that we're delivering down with just the apps we need.

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Randy.Price: And then the security policies in play as well around that, what the user can and can't do, what we're going to redirect into the session, right? All those sort of things from a USB perspective.

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Randy.Price: You know, it just helps, you know, strengthen that security posture. And also, again, just helping from an operational perspective, just helping to streamline, because we've got less vendors at play.

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Randy.Price: you know, simplified support, you know, less on the device itself that we're having to support as well. You know, again, just trying to provide that clinician with an easier experience as they're looking to support the end users there, or the customers at this point, so…

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, and another thing is, obviously, when you think about it, if, Randy, if you,

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Bill Sutton: if you've got your Citrix environment, whether it's on-prem or Citrix NAS, and the Unicon operating system is owned by Citrix and delivered by Citrix, and it's used to deliver Citrix, then you've got, really, alignment with the overall

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Bill Sutton: story. So you've got one vendor that's covering it from the endpoint all the way up to the application tier. Now, yes, you're layering in… you may layer in other things like Imprivata, which help support some of the security and accessibility features, but at the end of the day, when you start looking at ELUX in particular.

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Bill Sutton: Citrix owns it end-to-end, so any changes made on the endpoint operating system would be incorporated into

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Bill Sutton: CDAT or DAS, or vice versa, much more quickly than they might be within another environment. Another key thing is cost efficiency. There's no additional licensing fees. You, as long as you have UHMC, Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud, or the Citrix Platform License, we refer to that a lot at CPL,

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Bill Sutton: then you own the licenses for Unicon for your entire environment, which helps reduce the total cost of ownership.

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Bill Sutton: So if you're, you know, running… currently running Windows-based devices, then you can,

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Bill Sutton: very easily implement Unicon, in place. You can essentially run an Image Wizard on that device and lay down the Unicon OS, either in parallel to the Windows OS, or a replacement of the Windows OS. There's other ways to deploy it. A USB device, I believe Pixie.

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Bill Sutton: Can be leveraged to, to, to deploy the OS and so forth.

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Bill Sutton: So, this approach obviously provides real value to the org… to these organizations, enhancing patient care and outcomes, just like Randy and I were talking about. So it allows them to be more effective, and again, like I said earlier, really,

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Bill Sutton: Focusing on patient care rather than accessing the system. So, there is a lot more detail. If you visit the blog article, online, there's a lot more detail about, about integrating Improvado Unicon. There's a whole technical article.

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Bill Sutton: Go to the blog post, which will be referenced in the show notes for this podcast, and click on the technical documentation… documentation link, and

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Bill Sutton: you can see a lot more detail about the integration. Any final thoughts, Randy? That's really the end of the blog article, so this is a pretty quick one today.

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Randy.Price: Yeah, I was just gonna say, you know, we kind of hit on a couple things, right? One, the Unicon acquisition, the entitlement. Specifically today, we talked about the Imprivata integration, but…

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Randy.Price: you know, specifically around healthcare and how it can help both from a clinician satisfaction or a, you know, more timely patient care, right? But, you know, not just from the Imprivata standpoint with healthcare, but also just utilizing Unicon in general, right? So.

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Randy.Price: You know, definitely seen an uptick in customers that are looking to evaluate Unicon, especially since, to that point, right, the cost efficiency that you mentioned, because it is included with their entitlement, so…

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Randy.Price: I guess a call to action would be if you're interested and you have, you know, again, if you're using… utilizing Citrix today, which I assume if you're listening to this podcast, most likely you are.

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Randy.Price: definitely recommend reaching out. We could definitely help you guys if you guys want to, you know, look at it, look at a POC, evaluate it. We can definitely help in that regard, so…

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, Randy's already done at least one POC that I know of, and I think we've all built it in our labs, and it,

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Bill Sutton: works pretty well, certainly does what it says it's gonna do, and this is just another example of the improviding integration, is another example of

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Bill Sutton: Citrix working to, to expand the capabilities of the solutions that they own and have purchased. So it's just another commitment they have to, to, seeing moving things forward, I guess, and providing value for customers.

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Bill Sutton: Because at the end of the day, when you think about it, you're paying a lot for these… for the Citrix licenses. There's a lot you get. And this is, you know, this is one of those things, among many others, like Uber Agent or Device Trust, and…

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Bill Sutton: Here at Zentegra, we've learned all of them, and are capable and ready and able to help customers understand what's available to them and get it in a POC.

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Bill Sutton: Or a pilot phase to help certainly kick the tires.

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Randy.Price: Okay.

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Bill Sutton: So, that's it for the… for today's podcast. Thanks, Randy, for joining and riding along with me and… and providing some… some good content. I appreciate it, and I guess,

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Bill Sutton: I guess we'll see everyone next week, or talk to everyone next week.

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Randy.Price: Yeah, thanks for having me, Bill. We'll see you guys next week.

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Bill Sutton: See ya.

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Randy.Price: Thanks.