Case study: GOSH

Great Ormand Street has eliminated multiple log-ons

A specialist paediatric hospital and national centre of excellence in child healthcare, Great Ormond Street Hospital (Gosh) combines a range of specialities under one roof. Its uniqueness and diversity has meant that the hospital has hundreds of clinical IT systems running on a multi-vendor architecture.

David Bowen, ERP programme manager, says the challenge for the hospital is to orchestrate all these various applications from different vendors into something coherent for clinicians and other users.

‘A clinician will need to look at several different systems to do one task, and every time they change patient the applications have to be reloaded – and that wastes a massive amount of time,’ he says.

‘And if it is difficult to get into the systems then people start sharing user accounts, and that is not on. It is one thing to look up information using a shared account, but quite another to issue a prescription in somebody else’s name – that is where we would lose accountability.’

Gosh chose an identity and access management system from Sentillion to provide the users of its clinical systems with safe and secure access to its applications.

Users only need to sign in once to gain access to all the applications to which they have been granted rights. In addition, they will only need to select a patient once to see all the applications that have data for that particular patient. Eliminating the need to log on multiple times and hunt through each application to find patient data will significantly reduce time and frustration levels for staff.

‘We have a constant battle between openness and confidentiality,’ says Bowen. ‘Most of our main applications have a reasonably sophisticated facility for limiting functionality according to roles; however they cannot yet segment the patient sector allowing us to restrict user access to particular patient gro ups. At the moment the onus for confidentiality lies with the staff.’

Recognising that healthcare is a dynamic environment, Bowen envisages a time when access to clinical systems and even parts of the building will use proximity smartcards and biometrics.

‘The computer systems will know who is accessing them without being touched – a great benefit for infection control,’ he says.

‘Smartcards already make it more difficult to share logins, and proximity cards, providing the switching is fast, will make the access system even more secure. For Gosh, single sign-on is the first step on a long road to full identity control and access management.’