1. Speeding EMR Adoption with Single Sign-On at
St. Croix Regional Medical Center
INTRODUCTION
St. Croix Regional Medical Center (SCRMC) has been providing healthcare to residents
of the St. Croix River Valley areas in Wisconsin and Minnesota since 1919. It is one of
the largest healthcare providers in Wisconsin, with more than 500 employees across
multiple locations. The main campus includes a 29-bed critical access hospital and
clinic, with three community clinics that serve rural areas.
COMPANY
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
• Employees: 500
St. Croix Regional Medical Center adopted electronic health records in 200x—well
before the HITECH Act and its incentives because it recognized the potential benefits INDUSTRY
to quality of care and efficiency that could be achieved by moving from paper to • Healthcare
electronic records. SCRMC chose NextGen Ambulatory EHR for its Electronic Medical
Records (EMR) solution.
APPLICATIONS
In implementing the EMR solution, the IT team was careful to provide clinician • NextGen Ambulatory
efficiency and physician satisfaction. They worried that the need to login to the EMR EHR, Inpatient
application in each new patient room could be a real disincentive for clinicians in Financials and
adopting EMR. According to Brent McCurdy, IT Manager at SCRMC, “We knew that Inpatient Clinicals;
doctors and nurses would not like having to type in names and passwords repeatedly Orchard® Harvest™
when providing care, or to log out the previous session if the person before them LIS, web-based
forgot to do so.” applications
Security was another critical concern. SCRMC had PCs in each patient or clinic room. CHALLENGES
With the patient record now available on the PC, a nurse or physician needed to be
• Needed to increase
able to lock down the entire PC instantly when they left the room, so as not to expose
clinician EMR
patient data.
adoption
Says McCurdy, “Physicians as a group tend to leave things logged in, and they call the • Clinician inefficiency
IT department when they forget passwords. We knew that adding electronic medical handling multiple
records to their jobs would only increase those issues.”And of course the IT group logins and accounts
needed to carefully audit and track all access to patient information—something that
had not been possible with paper records. • Needed to comply
with security
To address these concerns, the IT group decided to couple the EMR deployment with regulations
a single sign-on solution that could accommodate fingerprint biometric authentication
for fast, secure access to applications. RESULTS
• Implemented
THE IMPRIVATA ONESIGN® SOLUTION successful EMR
After evaluating a number of different single sign-on solutions, the IT team chose adoption
Imprivata OneSign for several compelling reasons: • Increased clinician
• Using OneSign required fewer clicks and keystrokes for providers and clinicians to access satisfaction
patient data and applications.
• Better security for
• Imprivata OneSign did not require any changes to Active Directory schema.
shared workstations
• Imprivata OneSign has tight integration with various strong authentication methods,
including the fingerprint readers that St. Croix chose.
• IT staff could add new applications to the environment quickly and easily with Imprivata’s
Application Profiler

2. BEFORE IMPRIVATA ONESIGN AFTER IMPRIVATA ONESIGN
Clinicians needed to login/logout of multiple applications; Single-touch authentication for clinicians; fewer password problems
forgotten passwords and descreased helpdesk calls
Workstations left online in exam rooms Constant hotkey or time-out lock-down of unattended workstations
Lack of visibility into access of paper charts Complete audit record of access to electronic medical records
To roll out single sign-on with EMR, the IT group first identified the sets of applications
that users would need to deliver patient care. For example, clinicians needed single sign- “Single sign-on
on to all of the applications in order to provide patient care in the exam room. is essential for
EMR adoption—I
THE RESULTS
don’t think our
Once they started enrolling users, Imprivata OneSign was so popular that the IT group
physicians would
accelerated its implementation. Says McCurdy, “Once the doctors and nurses saw how
it worked, they all wanted to use it. We ended up rolling out OneSign ahead of the EMR have it any
solution.” other way. Using
Today more than 200 clinicians and physicians use Imprivata OneSign at SCRMC. 100 OneSign reduces
fingerprint readers provide one-touch biometric authentication at the point of care, such the keystrokes
as exam rooms and doctors’ offices. In its remote clinics, the OneSign and NextGen
and effort of
applications workstations access Imprivata OneSign and the NextGen application using
Terminal Services. authentication,
so physicians can
In exam rooms, clinicians simply touch the fingerprint reader to automatically unlock the
computer and access the EMR application. Simply pressing the F4 key locks the computer keep their focus on
when the clinician leaves. If the clinician forgets to press F4, OneSign automatically locks the patient.”
the workstation after a period of inactivity. The workstation is unlocked with a single
touch of the fingerprint reader.
Brent McCurdy
Since deploying Imprivata OneSign, SCRMC has added several NextGen healthcare IT Manager
applications, as well as other applications, including web-based applications. Today it St. Croix Medical Center
offers single sign-on to 12-15 applications, and plans to add more.
McCurdy credits Imprivata OneSign with aiding physician acceptance of the EMR solution.
“Single sign-on is essential for EMR adoption—I don’t think our physicians would have
it any other way. Using OneSign reduces the keystrokes and effort of authentication, so
physicians can keep their focus on the patient.”
1 877 ONESIGN | 1 781 674 2700 | www.imprivata.com
Copyright © 2010 Imprivata, Inc. All rights reserved. Imprivata and OneSign are registered trademarks of Imprivata, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.
The Application Profile Generator and OneSign Agent are trademarks of Imprivata, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
MKT-SS-SCRMC-Ver1-03-2011