MUSE Musings
Having spent last week at the 2008 International MUSE (Medical Users Software Exchange) Conference in Grapevine Texas - the 25th annual gathering of clinical and technical users of Meditech software - I was delighted to see SSO is such a hot topic among this group. There were five customer presentations related to SSO and Strong Authentication, and all of them were filled to capacity.
Also of note was the fact that at a gathering on Monday of 62 CIOs, CMIOs, and CNOs representing Meditech hospitals, it was clear that SSO was one of the priorities that they plan to address. As it was explained to me by one of our customers, the group was broken into smaller workshops and given a $6M annual IT budget. Then they were asked to work collaboratively to develop and prioritize initiatives for a five year plan at a fictitious hospital.
As expected, investment in clinical applications took precedence in the Priority Matrix that was developed based on a polling of the groups. The Matrix consists of 4 quadrants; Avoid, Consider, Implement and Invest. According to this group, SSO has crossed into the Invest quadrant, and most of the group felt as though it was something to be addressed before the end of 2009. It seems that this interest is being driven as much by the need for user convenience as it is by HIPAA compliance. If you work in a healthcare organization, I'd be curious to hear about your priorities and if this sounds in line with your plans.
John Clark, Product Manager