HIMSS is right around the corner. It's one of our favorite conferences of the year, as we get to see many of our healthcare customers all in one place. As I mentioned in my last post, if you're attending the conference this year, please plan to stop by our booth (#7339) and say hello, or check out the presentations by Imprivata's customers. OhioHealth and Southwest Washington Medical Center will be discussing the ‘Paperless Hospital' and ‘HIPAA Audits' respectively. With all the focus on healthcare now, what trends am I going to be looking for at HIMSS this year? Here are a few topics that our customers have shared with us:…

Physical logical security convergence has garnered increased attention over the past year, and we've had countless conversations with both IT departments and physical security teams about the people, process and technology issues that come with the territory. Integrating teams and policy, not just the technology, needs to be well thought out. Increasingly, the path of our conversations with prospects and customers interested in converging physical and logical access focuses on where to start that type of project.…

Next week, Tuesday 27th of May, we will be speaking at the ICT & Healthcare seminar in Ede, the Netherlands. Topic of our discussions will be clear and simple: how can we restore the 'Identity balance'. With this topic, we aim to explore how customers and partners can work with healthcare organisations to strike the right balance between...…

Catching up on some reading after a few weeks on the road, most notably at VMworld 2010, I read Joseph Goedert’s Health Data Management article on the Privacy and Security Tiger Team’s recommendations for privacy issues that were sent to The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). The core recommendations focus on how to empower patient consent and how to ensure appropriate use and exchange of personal health information (PHI) by care givers and business associates – all in the name of good data stewardship – as ONC encourages adoption of healthcare IT.…

There’s a lot of discussion around meaningful use, its definition and how organizations can obtain the government incentives that recent legislation promises. However, in the dash for these types of healthcare IT investment reimbursements, one must not overlook the role of security risk in satisfying compliance requirements.…

We often hear of security getting in the way when it comes to clinicians wanting immediate access to patient data. Since it's better to hear from one's peers, Imprivata asked some of its healthcare customers for tips on implementing single sign-on and strong authentication to eliminate password management headaches and how it facilitated making it easier for clinicians to get access to the records they need. As we turn our attention to HIMSS 2009, we want to share our customers' advice, thoughts and concerns on how best to navigate through the employee access management obstacles:…

The New York Times recently posted an article decrying passwords as an inadequate defense mechanism for security today in a wave of identity theft occurrences. The article goes on to push a cryptography-based approach to log-on systems, touting ‘information cards' that rely on the computer handshake between machines to authenticate a user, or in this case, a site visitor. The article goes on to rail against the OpenID initiative because of its password-driven approach to SSO to access OpenID-enabled Web sites.…

To paraphrase Princess Leia, ‘the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.' The same can be said in trying to manage identities in today's enterprise. A number of weeks back, I got into a discussion with the 451Group's Steve Coplan about this very topic: the chaos of identities.…

Over at the Life as a Healthcare CIO blog, John D. Halamka MD captured a list of top barriers to electronic health record (EHR) implementations, then added on with another ‘Top 10’ that puts a little fun into the serious business of EHRs. Below are barriers that stood out to me from a data security and healthcare access management perspective, and I urge you to check out John’s blog for more specifics – definitely worth the read and a great source of information. The key Barriers to deploying EHR worth noting...…

A recent BankInfoSecurity article reported that the Massachusetts Data Protection Law has been delayed yet again, pushing the new effective date back to March 1, 2010. As part of the law, organizations are required to protect confidential data – social security numbers, driver license numbers and financial account/credit/debit card numbers – of Massachusetts citizens. The regulation covers all non-public data, regardless of how the company obtains the information.…

We've found that the best resource for better understanding how to solve employee access management are our customers. So over the past week or so, as a few of our customers have shared details of their OneSign experiences, I thought you may want to hear what some of them are saying and doing...…

Recently, according to a Federal Computer Week article, the Drug Enforcement Administration proposed rules to allow e-Prescribing of controlled substances, such as painkillers and stimulants. The proposed rules require doctors to use two forms of identification for each transmission of e-Prescriptions for controlled substances in addition to an annual audit of each system by a certified public accountancy. Under current rules, doctors may use e-Prescribing for most prescriptions but must sign a written prescription for Schedule II controlled substances, such as Nembutal, OxyContin and opium. The DEA rule, if it becomes final, would allow doctors to use the same system for generating and transmitting all prescriptions.…

I'm often asked what seems like a simple question: 'what's new in identity management?' As simple as it is, it's a big question so here are five trends that I see out there for identity management... at least for now.…

The Meaningful Use Analysis presented at the recent HIT Policy Committee Meeting indicates that 2,246 Eligible Professionals and 100 Hospitals have attested successfully. That’s a good start to EHR Adoption; with Stage 2 potentially delayed for these earlier adopters it will be interesting to see how many more attest to Meaningful Use in 2011.…

Data breaches in healthcare are certainly not new. Most data breaches today occur when electronic patient information (known as "protected health information" or PHI in the HIPAA regulation) is stored unencrypted on a device that is lost or stolen. All of the data breach laws in effect today state that as long as the data or device are encrypted, there is no data breach and therefore no liability or legal remedy. So if it's that easy, why do the number of breaches in healthcare continue to grow at alarming rates? …

As leaders in technology adoption, Radiologists are starting to look to biometrics to help provide No Click Access to the various systems and places they nee…

On November 30, 2011 HHS announced that they approve of the proposed push of Stage 2 Meaningful Use from 2013 to 2014 that has been talked about since July of this year. But who does this decision really impact?…

Study spotlights the value of single sign-on solutions for hospitals seeking meaningful use credits. An eye-opening new study that was just released from the Ponemon Institute revealed roughly 60 percent of the more than 400 healthcare IT respondents believe that single sign-on (SSO) solutions support their organizations’ efforts to demonstrate the “meaningful use” of EMR adoption. …

Today, Teradici have released Teradici PCoIP® Firmware release 3.5. Within this firmware update is code specifically designed to integrate with a new API from Imprivata that enables full No Click Access™ from a Teradici-enabled PCoIP zero client. This integration supports strong authentication with just the tap of an access card or ID badge to automate the process of bringing the user directly to their virtual desktop.…

On April 21st, the HIT Policy Committee Certification/Adoption Workgroup held a meeting to discuss Electronic Health Record (EHR) usability.…