Ask HN: Modern clinic IT?

[trestletech]

Some friends of mine are setting up a free clinic and have asked for help with their IT. Right now they're accessing a Cloud-based medical records system from a handful of donated Windows laptops. The functionality they need is a browser, printing, and uploading files from their scanners.

Their current woes revolve around getting printers and scanners configured on all the laptops, but I'd like to think a little bigger than that.

If you were setting up the IT for a small clinic from scratch, what approach would you take? Manage individual devices? Thin clients pointing to the Cloud? PXE boot from a local server?

Keep in mind that they don't have an IT person on-call, so we'll need to find something stable or at least one that doesn't fail catastrophically.

[PaulHoule]

Why not manage them the way people manage Chromebooks? Make a system image with the printing and scanning set up, write an installer, something.

If a machine gets trashed, you either restore from the system image, replace some parts (ex. hard drive), or maybe just install a new machine.