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Balancing HIPAA Compliance With User Satisfaction and Information Access
By Josh Rosales

One of the most common problems healthcare organizations face is the inability of staff to quickly access the data they need when they need it. These situations—where patient care professionals need immediate access to vital data—are a daily occurrence. Further complicating matters, strict regulations such as HIPAA were put in place to improve and protect patient information. The issue is that while these technologies ensure the privacy of patient data, they often inconvenience users, reduce productivity, and interfere with patient care.

For example, healthcare clinicians must typically remember several different passwords to log on to a computer and access key data and preauthorized applications, potentially compromising their ability to deliver timely care. This was the case at Lake Forest Hospital in suburban Chicago.

Lake Forest faced the same issues confronting most hospitals in today’s digital environment. HIPAA regulations required the adoption of a complex web of passwords and user authentication technologies designed to protect sensitive data and ensure greater accountability. Staff were burdened with remembering as many as seven to nine different passwords, which was becoming a time-consuming nightmare for physicians, nurses, and other clinical staff. This was also an obstacle to timely treatment and decision making—especially in critical care situations. Additionally, calls from users who needed their passwords reset devoured a significant portion of the hospitals’ help desk time and budget.

The hospital needed a solution to the growing problem of user access and patient data security that adhered to compliance regulations. As with all hospitals, the No. 1 priority is to ensure patient safety while improving user productivity and overall security within the organization.

Single Sign-On to Ease Multiple Passwords
In response to these issues, Lake Forest implemented a single sign-on (SSO) solution to relieve the clinicians’ login/logout pains, comply with HIPAA regulations, and strengthen overall security. With SSO, clinicians are required to remember and provide just one set of credentials—user name and password—to access the full portfolio of applications, data, and services for which that user is authorized. This means that each user’s network identity will be linked to all the relevant application credentials, with authentication being managed in the background. It also means that doctors, nurses, and clinicians can spend less time logging in and out of network applications and more time with their patients.

The new SSO solution enables Lake Forest to meet HIPAA privacy and security requirements in two ways: strengthening application password security and establishing user application access data. SSO solutions assist the management of password policies via the implementation of strong passwords, or strong authentication methods, at one central point. This results in better authentication management and greater security. SSO also enforces network-level authentication, enabling a single point of control for access, authorization, authentication, and tracking access to information/data.

Lake Forest clinicians are thrilled with the SSO initiative and feedback has been overwhelming. As a result of the solution, the need for physicians and staff to memorize multiple passwords has been eliminated. Although the project is still in the early stages of implementation, a 30% increase in help desk productivity is expected, as clinicians are now spending less time logging in and out of network applications, which will improve the security of patient data and overall patient care.

SSO enabled Lake Forest to accomplish what it envisioned: eliminating generic, multiuser passwords and user names, reducing help desk costs, ensuring HIPAA compliance, and providing physicians and staff simple and secure access to the applications they need each day to deliver the highest levels of quality care.

— Josh Rosales is the security administrator at Lake Forest Hospital.

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