The Health Alliance is an integrated healthcare delivery system located in Cincinnati, Ohio, that includes The Christ Hospital, The University Hospital, The St. Luke Hospitals, The Jewish Hospital, The Fort Hamilton Hospital and the physicians of Alliance Primary Care. For nearly 200 years, the Health Alliance Hospitals have grown to become leaders in medical excellence by continuing to plan and innovate for the future. For the past ten years, Christ Hospital has been awarded Cincinnati’s Most Preferred hospital (NRC). Both Christ and University Hospitals have been named as some of America’s Best Hospitals by U.S. News and World Report.
The Ohio State Board of Pharmacy requires all organizations that use computerized medication ordering applications to comply with their positive identification regulations. Faced with the need to achieve biometric authentication compliance with this regulation, The Christ Hospital and The University Hospital (both part of The Health Alliance of Greater Cincinnati) turned to Boston WorkStation.
By using Boston WorkStation to integrate with the Novell Modular Authentication Service (NMAS), the system can now notify the Hospitals’ pharmacies in print and via email if anyone fails biometric authentication and uses the secondary authentication of a password. This solution is integral to their implementation of a Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE).
The Ohio State Board of Pharmacy requires all organizations that use computerized medication ordering applications to comply with their positive identification regulations.
Boston WorkStation captures order events on the Hospitals’ Computerized Physician Order Entry system and alerts the user to automatically authenticate through the biometric process. The use of biometric fingerprint readers will ensure that any individual involved in dispensing, administering or prescribing drugs is securely authenticated to the CPOE system. The Hospitals have rolled this system out to 1,200 workstations, 50 mobile carts and have enrolled 1,000 members.
“Our CPOE deployment is a key patient safety and quality initiative for our organization. The ongoing effort to deploy CPOE at our facilities beyond the initial rollout continues and Boston WorkStation will be used in that deployment,” states Susan Abla, RN, Health Alliance manager responsible for CPOE deployment.
The use of biometrics for authentication provides the Health Alliance Hospitals with strong levels of security and improved accessibility to its systems for authorized users. Boston WorkStation is bridging the gap between two off-the-shelf solutions.
