Speeding EMR Adoption with Single Sign-On at St. Croix Regional Medical Center

COMPANY

• Employees: 500

INDUSTRY

• Healthcare

APPLICATIONS

• NextGen Ambulatory EHR, Inpatient Financials and Inpatient Clinicals; Orchard® Harvest™ LIS, web-based applications

CHALLENGES

• Needed to increase clinician EMR adoption

• Clinician inefficiency handling multiple logins and accounts

• Needed to comply with security regulations

RESULTS

• Implemented successful EMR adoption

• Increased clinician satisfaction

• Better security for shared workstations

INTRODUCTION

St. Croix Regional Medical Center (SCRMC) has been providing healthcare to residents of the St. Croix River Valley areas in Wisconsin and Minnesota since 1919. It is one of the largest healthcare providers in Wisconsin, with more than 500 employees across multiple locations. The main campus includes a 29-bed critical access hospital and clinic, with three community clinics that serve rural areas.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

St. Croix Regional Medical Center adopted electronic health records in 200x—well before the HITECH Act and its incentives because it recognized the potential benefits to quality of care and efficiency that could be achieved by moving from paper to electronic records. SCRMC chose NextGen Ambulatory EHR for its Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solution.

In implementing the EMR solution, the IT team was careful to provide clinician efficiency and physician satisfaction. They worried that the need to login to the EMR application in each new patient room could be a real disincentive for clinicians in adopting EMR. According to Brent McCurdy, IT Manager at SCRMC, “We knew that doctors and nurses would not like having to type in names and passwords repeatedly when providing care, or to log out the previous session if the person before them forgot to do so.”

Security was another critical concern. SCRMC had PCs in each patient or clinic room. With the patient record now available on the PC, a nurse or physician needed to be able to lock down the entire PC instantly when they left the room, so as not to expose patient data.

Says McCurdy, “Physicians as a group tend to leave things logged in, and they call the IT department when they forget passwords. We knew that adding electronic medical records to their jobs would only increase those issues.”And of course the IT group needed to carefully audit and track all access to patient information—something that had not been possible with paper records.

To address these concerns, the IT group decided to couple the EMR deployment with a single sign-on solution that could accommodate fingerprint biometric authentication for fast, secure access to applications.

THE IMPRIVATA ONESIGN® SOLUTION

After evaluating a number of different single sign-on solutions, the IT team chose Imprivata OneSign for several compelling reasons:

• Using OneSign required fewer clicks and keystrokes for providers and clinicians to access patient data and applications.

• Imprivata OneSign did not require any changes to Active Directory schema.

• Imprivata OneSign has tight integration with various strong authentication methods, including the fingerprint readers that St. Croix chose.

• IT staff could add new applications to the environment quickly and easily with Imprivata’s Application Profiler

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MKT-SS-SCRMC-Ver1-03-2011

“Single sign-on

is essential for

EMR adoption—I

don’t think our

physicians would

have it any

other way. Using

OneSign reduces

the keystrokes

and effort of

authentication,

so physicians can

keep their focus on

the patient.”

Brent McCurdy

IT Manager

St. Croix Medical Center

BEFORE IMPRIVATA ONESIGN AFTER IMPRIVATA ONESIGN

Clinicians needed to login/logout of multiple applications; forgotten passwords

Single-touch authentication for clinicians; fewer password problems and descreased helpdesk calls

Workstations left online in exam rooms Constant hotkey or time-out lock-down of unattended workstations

Lack of visibility into access of paper charts Complete audit record of access to electronic medical records

To roll out single sign-on with EMR, the IT group first identified the sets of applications that users would need to deliver patient care. For example, clinicians needed single sign-on to all of the applications in order to provide patient care in the exam room.

THE RESULTS

Once they started enrolling users, Imprivata OneSign was so popular that the IT group accelerated its implementation. Says McCurdy, “Once the doctors and nurses saw how it worked, they all wanted to use it. We ended up rolling out OneSign ahead of the EMR solution.”

Today more than 200 clinicians and physicians use Imprivata OneSign at SCRMC. 100 fingerprint readers provide one-touch biometric authentication at the point of care, such as exam rooms and doctors’ offices. In its remote clinics, the OneSign and NextGen applications workstations access Imprivata OneSign and the NextGen application using Terminal Services.

In exam rooms, clinicians simply touch the fingerprint reader to automatically unlock the computer and access the EMR application. Simply pressing the F4 key locks the computer when the clinician leaves. If the clinician forgets to press F4, OneSign automatically locks the workstation after a period of inactivity. The workstation is unlocked with a single touch of the fingerprint reader.

Since deploying Imprivata OneSign, SCRMC has added several NextGen healthcare applications, as well as other applications, including web-based applications. Today it offers single sign-on to 12-15 applications, and plans to add more.

McCurdy credits Imprivata OneSign with aiding physician acceptance of the EMR solution. “Single sign-on is essential for EMR adoption—I don’t think our physicians would have it any other way. Using OneSign reduces the keystrokes and effort of authentication, so physicians can keep their focus on the patient.”