About Oaklawn Hospital
Based in Marshall, Michigan, Oaklawn Hospital is a highly regarded regional healthcare organization licensed for 77 acute care beds and 17 inpatient psychiatric care beds. The hospital has received the Governor's Award for Improving Patient Safety and Quality of Care for five years running and recently achieved Magnet designation, putting them in the top five percent of hospitals for nursing excellence.
Challenge
Oaklawn Hospital was looking for a way to safeguard patients' health data and comply with HIPAA regulations, while enabling clinicians to quickly access patient records. "Protecting patient information is an obligation we take very seriously," said Natalie Spivak, information systems director for Oaklawn Hospital. "We have PCs in every patient room that are shared by nurses, technicians and doctors. We needed to accelerate their access to patients' medical records, while increasing the security of sensitive patient information."
Accessing patients' records was also a challenge when doctors were paged. "It's tough for doctors to remember multiple passwords in the middle of the night," said Spivak. "Their primary concern is getting information as quickly as possible to help the patient."
Previously, users had to remember up to 20 different passwords to access various clinical systems. "Sometimes users wrote down passwords, or resorted to generic IDs for ease of log in at clinical workstations," said Kaiti Vasbinder, network specialist for Oaklawn Hospital. "With shared passwords, it's difficult to ensure the right people are accessing the appropriate systems. Moreover, if a clinician walked away from a terminal it could take 20 minutes for the system to time out, leaving a chance that an unauthorized person could view private patient data. We wanted to provide users with single sign-on capabilities so they could quickly access the information they needed and reset their password if they forgot it."
Novell Solution
Oaklawn Hospital turned to C/D/H, a Novell Platinum PartnerSM, for a solution. After evaluating the hospital's requirements, C/D/H recommended Novell SecureLogin. "With Novell SecureLogin, you get the biggest bang for your buck, as it increases the security of login policies that actually speeds users' access to data and applications," said Erik Gilreath, consultant at C/D/H.
The cross-platform capabilities of the Novell solution appealed to the hospital's IT staff. "We have clinical applications running on multiple platforms including UNIX, Windows and IBM iSeries," said Spivak. "We found that most single sign-on solutions couldn't integrate with the IBM iSeries platform," said Spivak. "The fact that Novell SecureLogin can enable single sign-on across all platforms is a huge benefit."
C/D/H quickly deployed Novell SecureLogin to provide single sign-on access to more than a dozen clinical applications. The team also created a context management script that provides auto look-up of patient records between the clinical and radiology software applications. "Radiologists will do anything they can to save time," said Spivak. "Providing context management capabilities helps them do just that. If they're looking up a patient in the clinical system, they can just open the radiology application and it instantly performs a query to locate the patient's x-rays. The system can perform patient searches quicker than a user can."
Oaklawn Hospital has been very pleased with their experience with C/D/H. "We wanted to have the solution deployed quickly, and decided to engage C/D/H to take the lead on the project," said Spivak. "The C/D/H consultants we worked with were extremely knowledgeable, and ensured that the project was a success."
Results
Since implementing Novell SecureLogin to provide users with single sign-on access to clinical applications, Oaklawn Hospital has reduced the number of passwords users have to remember by about 75 percent, while decreasing login and password-related help desk calls by 50 percent.
"Our doctors and clinicians have been very pleased with how quick and easy it is to log in to the various clinical applications they need throughout the day," said Vasbinder. "Since implementing Novell SecureLogin, we've accelerated users' access to data by 80 percent. This means that doctors can spend more time with patients rather than computers, and can securely access patient records from anywhere."
"Any organization that needs to provide its users with quick and secure access to multiple applications should consider Novell SecureLogin," said Spivak.
The Novell solution also plays a key role in HIPAA compliance by strengthening the security of patient records. With Novell SecureLogin in place, the hospital has eliminated the use of shared user accounts and now has an audit trail of all login activity. To ensure that patient information is no longer accessible once a user walks away from a workstation, the hospital has cut system logout time by 75 percent.