How Single Sign-On into Hospital Systems Improves the Lives of Doctors and Administrators

It was a surprise to me when I learned that most hospitals don’t provide their physicians, surgeons, clinicians or hospital administrators with remote access to internal hospital systems.

I know that nowadays everyone is worried about personal health information getting into the wrong hands, but it seems to me that the average patient’s gall bladder is not of much interest to the average hacker.  I don’t mean to make light of the issue of patient security – I just mean to say that the virtual private network technology in use today provides such a high degree of encryption that the security of patient records is not really an issue anymore.

That being said, when you consider how many different systems, from different manufacturers, using independent operating systems, are spread throughout a hospital, it’s not surprising that hospital staff are stuck in the building long after they needed to be there.

It’s no small feat to provide remote access to the internal network of a hospital – it’s quite another thing to also provide access to the PACS, the EHR, patient monitors, financial systems, virtualized applications and shared file systems.   In other industries, virtualizing the workplace has become a major initiative, because it reduces overhead and helps companies become “green”.   One of the ways businesses make it easier for remote users to access internal systems is through “Single Sign-On” which provides access to all the company’s internal systems after a user provides authorization credentials (whether in the form of username/password or some more robust criteria).

Single Sign-On for hospitals has been a bit of a pipe-dream for IT Management up until recently, as hospital systems come from so many different manufacturers and are often much older than the average business would normally keep a technology.

I have read recently of one company that is providing Single Sign-On remote access capability specifically for hospital applications and as I mentioned in the last post, remote access is a critical technology to improve the lives of healthcare professionals.  Add Single Sign-On to the technology, and you’ve reached the next level of ease-of-use.

AnyWare Group, a Canadian company focused on providing remote access for hospitals, recently announced that it’s ROAM Platform has been enhanced with Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality. <link>

ROAM provides remote access to all the systems in a hospital and can do it with one set of authentication criteria, from any computer, anywhere in the world.  To my mind, it’s not the anywhere in the world part that’s the most fascinating – it’s the fact that your doctor could go home and, if needed, get into systems, monitors, applications and files in a moments notice with no fuss and no hassle.  That has to mean that your doctor will get more family time, more rest, more recreation, more time away from the hospital, and I don’t know about you, but I work a lot better at my job when I’m rested and glad to be there.

-V-