It was with an element of nostalgia that I read the post 7 ways to secure physician text messages. Why Nostalgia I hear you ask? Well I’ll tell you. From 1995 until 2001 I worked in the Anti-virus industry. It was very different in those days. Viruses were written in bedrooms by kids, not by organized crime groups, No-one had anti-virus on their home computers and the AV updates were sent out monthly or quarterly on floppy disks.

After the recent 2008 HIMSS Conference, we conducted a survey of 171 healthcare IT decision makers to identify some of the trends they face relating to identity management. I wanted to call out a few interesting data points...

The merger between RxHub and SureScripts has garnered extensive coverage - here,here and here, among others. This is a huge step forward for standardizing on, and speeding the adoption of, electronic prescriptions. It is significant progress, and the latest of many advancements the healthcare sector is driving forward. There is one area of the electronic prescriptions story though that is missing from all of the stories around the RxHub/SureScripts merger, though it's an important piece of the equation - authenticating that the prescription drug order is legitimate, and truly from an approved physician. Electronic transactions are easier and quicker, sure, but so is the potential for misuse and fraud.

Steve Coplan of The 451 Group recently published a terrific report on Virtual Desktops that examines the intersection of management and security. Steve hit the nail on the head in describing the importance of user authentication in securing virtual desktops. This is especially relevant in healthcare, which is rapidly adopting virtual desktop access (VDA) to improve clinician productivity and secure patient data. We were also pleased that Steve mentioned the work Imprivata is doing with VMware around fast, seamless user access for virtual desktops...

As the trends of mobility and cool devices take more and more of our users outside the enterprise walls we run the risk of undoing all of the good work, security and cost savings that we’ve managed to put in place. If IT can’t, or doesn’t want to install agents to all of these new devices, how do we get our authentication and single sign-on to work?

Today, a new partnership with PhoneFactor has been announced, offering a new way of authenticating to complement the broad range of existing authentication modalities supported by Imprivata OneSign and OneSign Anywhere. PhoneFactor is two-factor authentication working out-of-band, and requiring nothing but a regular phone.

Healthcare has the reputation of being highly resistant to change, that paper based systems are the best solution and that clinicians will simply not use any replacement. Why else would a hospital have to prove that they are meaningfully using new technology in order to receive the HITECH funding? Couldn’t we just trust them? So who’d have thunk it that in a survey of 477 IT professionals across multiple industries, it’s healthcare that are leading the way in the deployment of desktop virtualization!

By combining the benefits of roaming desktops with the simplicity of No Click Access delivered by Imprivata OneSign, clinicians can now access Citrix XenDesktop or XenApp with the tap of a badge or swipe of a fingerprint - enabling clinicians to dedicate more of their time with their patients and less time with the computer.