St Helens does single sign-on

St Helens and Knowsley Health Informatics Service is implementing Imprivata’s single sign-on across its NHS organisations.

The HIS has deployed the single sign-on system across 90% of its GP practices and is rolling it out in its two acute hospitals, with community and mental health services to follow.

Neil Darvill, director of informatics at the HIS, told EHI the service is also looking at deploying OneSign on mobile devices.

“We’ve got some more roll-out to do in hospitals,” he said.

“We also have a very clear appetite to get it working on mobile devices such as tablets. We haven’t rolled it out in community and mental health yet. Sometimes the mobile working can have some issues, but it’s in work plan to solve that.”

Using a smart card, single sign-on gives clinicians access to systems they are authorised to use on any computer available.

Darvill said that the most important benefit was the ‘kiosk’ like function, which means that clinicians need a smart card to access the computer. This means there is no danger of a previous user leaving a device ‘locked’ to them.

“You can imagine how frustrating it is if a previous user left it locked. With our set-up we have configured the software to work with smart cards only and they can log-in in under 10 seconds,” he said.

“It’s been one of the most liked systems we have implemented. Clinicians all say how much of a burden has been lifted.”

The HIS has worked with its technology partner BMS to roll out the single sign-on system.

“Fundamentally, our whole IT security deployment was conceived with the aim of improving patient care whilst making efficiency savings,” said Darvill.