The 2015 winner in the category of Workflow Enhancement is Imprivata, Inc., the healthcare IT security company, based in Lexington, Massachusetts.  Omar Hussain, president and CEO of Imprivata, spoke with Healthcare Informatics about the importance of provider productivity, why Imprivata’s mission is to never lose a customer, and the challenges of creating meaningful systems in an ever-changing industry.

Imprivata OneSign Transforms Workflows by Enabling Fast, Secure Access to Clinical Applications, Saving Up to 45 Minutes per Provider, per Shift

Administrative tasks have always been a burden to health providers. In fact, according to a study by Health Affairs, administrative costs accounted for 25.3 percent of all hospital spending in the U.S. in 2014. However, until recently, physicians were able to delegate many of their administrative responsibilities to other staff members in order to focus on patient care. This is beginning to change.

There have been numerous efforts, or at least discussions, to get hospital physicians and staff to better communicate via text messages and away from widely used but somewhat antiquated pagers. But so far, it’s largely been problematic because people would use their own devices, potentially opening themselves and their hospitals up to HIPAA violations.

Beaufort (S.C.) Memorial Hospital has mostly changed over to a secure texting app, formally inserting into its workflow what providers were already doing with their devices.