Virtua Implements Single Sign-On to Improve Clinical System Access, Satisfaction, and Security

Virtua is a comprehensive multi-hospital healthcare system headquartered in Marlton, NJ with more than 36 care sites and four hospitals. A non-profit organization, Virtua employs 8,400 clinical and administrative personnel, and approximately 1,800 physicians serve as medical staff members. Virtua has distinguished itself as one of the first Six Sigma organizations in healthcare and as an early adopter of clinical and digital technologies. It has been honored twice with the New Jersey Governor's award for Clinical Excellence and recognized with the Leadership Award for Outstanding Achievement by Voluntary Hospitals of America.

THE CHALLENGE

Virtua planned to go live with their replacement clinical information system, which consisted of multiple integrated applications from various vendors, starting in October 2009. To do so, the hospital system needed to meet two main objectives. The first was to streamline the ease of access to these multiple vendor systems through a single logon. The second was to improve security on their individual workstations through more stringent controls. Virtua could only accomplish these objectives through a systematic approach.

THE SOLUTION

Virtua worked in partnership with Aspen Advisors to lead the planning, build, and deployment of the Microsoft Sentillion single sign-on (user context) product for the clinical information system rollout. Specific outcomes included:

• Developing an overall program roadmap with key milestones, expectations, key deliverables, and benefits for all identity management phases (including SSO for specific applications in the first phase and patient context management and additional applications in the second phases and beyond);
• Creating and managing an SSO governance and sustainability model;
• Managing timelines, expectations, key activities, deliverables, and the vendor contract to provide an end user tested solution around SSO and privacy management;
• Developing design documentation for role based definitions and an application roadmap with specific SSO system specifications; and
• Developing the testing strategy and managing the overall testing direction; and
• Organizing and managing the go live support and transition to operational support post go live.

THE RESULTS

Single sign-on was deployed in six months – half the time that is typical for a multi-hospital healthcare system – and drove real benefits to the hospital staff and physicians including:

• The ability to have one login to multiple clinical applications resulting in higher satisfaction and workflow efficiency;
• Improved workstation security and HIPAA compliance;
• An easy to utilize user interface for navigating between applications; and
• The ease of adding on new systems and applications in the future without having a security administration headache.