Tameside & Glossop 04-03-2009 16:43

Who Made Product:

Imprivata

Product:

Imprivata OneSign

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General Overview:

A HEALTHCARE SUCCESS STORThe Business Challenge

Tameside & Glossop Acute Services NHS Trust is located at the Tameside General Hospital in Ashton-Under-Lyne. Situated at the foot of the Pennines, eight miles to the east of Manchester, the Trust services a population of over 250,000. The population is concentrated in the largely industrialised areas of the eight townships of Tameside, which comprises Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council.

The Trust has over 1000 employees, most of whom use a number of IT systems for performing their day to day duties. With the reliance on IT growing, and a wider range of applications available for staff to fulfill their roles, the organisation’s IT department began to identify a significant problem around password management.

"The Trust was faced with a growing password management problem: staff had a large number of different log-ins to remember and this was becoming an issue for them," said Geoff Berry, Assistant Director of IT for the Trust. "it was also a problem for our IT Services Desk: a significant amount of the calls being handled were specifically related to password reset requests. We wanted to solve this in a way that would also improve our ability to audit user activity and prove that security policies are being followed."

Before OneSign

• Unable to track user access to confidential patient information

• Needed to deploy strong authentication

• New digital image PACS systems meant four additional passwords per user

After OneSign

• Able to audit user activity

• Strong authentication leveraged existing NHS National Smart Card technology

• Easier transition to new digital system eased workflow issues

The IMPRIVATA ONESIGN Solution

Having considered a number of approaches, the Trust turned to Imprivata and its OneSign® appliance based solution. Following a successful demonstration and pilot phase, the Trust has now begun roll-out of single sign-on and strong authentication to its staff. The implementation will cover both clinical and non-clinical employees. Nurses, doctors and consultants across the organisation will use the NHS National Smart Card as their factor for strong authentication. Once they are logged in, employees are securely and automatically signed into all their authorised applications.

An example of the benefits that OneSign can deliver is evident in the way in which it has already helped ease the transition to a new electronic Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS). Tameside has recently gone live with PACS in its Radiology department as part of the National Program for IT. While using digital images instead of traditional x-ray films was both more convenient and easier for staff, there was a problem due to the number of application passwords and change requests that were required to keep the system secure.

"To view images, staff would have to access four different systems as part of the workflow, each with its own username and password. Logging into these separate applications could be time-consuming, and one forgotten log-in would prevent access to the whole system. Using OneSign, the Trust has eliminated this issue: clinical staff and patients now get the full benefits of the new PACS system, while overall security of data is enhanced," continued Berry.

By the NUMBERS:

1 image on the new electronic PACS system

4 different passwords required to access the image on new electronic PACS system

0 x-ray images a radiologist could examine if even 1 of the 4 passwords was forgotten

The Results

The OneSign solution will deliver benefits to the Trust on a number of fronts. Working with Imprivata and partner BMS, the Trust will gain increased control and management over user credentials, greater audit capabilities and a reduction in password management workload for its IT services desk. On completion, the Trust’s 1000 employees will benefit by not being locked out of applications due to forgotten passwords, as well as overall improvement of workflows.

As NHS organisations roll out the centrally procured McAfee SafeBoot encryption software it is worth noting a single process can be facilitated for user authentication for both McAfee SafeBoot and OneSign Single Sign-On from Imprivata.

During Tameside’s recent implementation of the McAfee SafeBoot software, BMS, an approved partner for both solutions, provided the necessary skills and experience to guarantee the organisation could deliver strong encryption, access control and security compliance whilst ensuring the user experience continued to be seamless, bringing together data loss prevention and converged access and auditing.

Avril Davies, Head of IT Services at Tameside recently said, "Protecting patient data is a crucial activity for us. Imprivata Single Sign-On and McAfee SafeBoot are now an essential part of our integrated security portfolio and it is critical to Trust security that these diverse systems work together. We can now deliver strong encryption, access control, security compliance, create workflow efficiencies, all of which contribute to us delivering real security of data."