Microsoft announced a number of contracts in the UK to help NHS trusts to deliver greater clinical productivity and reduce costs by using Identity and Access Management (IAM) products, which have been built exclusively for the healthcare sector. County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, NHS Sutton and Merton, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust and North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust have signed contracts for one or more of the Microsoft IAM products.
Vergence, acquired from Sentillion, will be deployed at both Salisbury and North Cumbria to streamline the process of signing on and off from different workstations. Once logged on, Vergence enables clinicians to select the patient of interest once, from any system, in order to synchronise all applications to that specific patient. This ability to automatically share context between applications will increase clinical productivity and minimises the risk of mixing data for different patients, which improves patient safety.
Mark Thomas, Director of Information Management and Technology at North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust, said "Microsoft's suite of products will help provide a huge increase in productivity not least by allowing clinicians to rapidly switch between applications tuned to the specific patient, which also reduces the risk of confusion. In addition, it will enable Trusts to meet the requirements of the government and the vision for a new world health infrastructure."
County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust needed a solution to address both password and identity management as the IT Service Desk were receiving in excess of 200 telephone calls a day on password unlocking and the provisioning of new user accounts alone. The Trust recognised the benefits of combining expreSSO solution with Identity Management and will become the reference site in the UK for provision. Craig Robinson, IT Support Manager said: "We will reap the rewards of The Provisioning solution very quickly after a large number of staff from Community Health transferred into the organisation. All of these new staff require accounts creating and managing on an ongoing basis."
Peter Gill, Head of Informatics at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust said; "As we deploy more and more clinical software it is important for us to be able to give clinicians a quick way to navigate between the systems preserving the patient's context and without expecting them to remember many logins and passwords. We plan to implement Vergence as a key part of our Informatics Strategy to support the development of our Electronic Patient Record."
In the UK Microsoft's IAM portfolio consists of three products created specifically for healthcare organisations: expreSSO, a next-generation cost efficient single sign-on solution, Vergence, which unifies the single sign-on capability of expreSSO with context management, role-based access and strong authentication into a fully integrated clinical workstation and Microsoft proVision for automated centralised creation and management of network and application accounts. Collectively over 17 NHS trusts have signed contracts for IAM products from Microsoft to help deliver better clinical efficiency and reduced costs.
"With the expected change in healthcare delivery, hospitals need to adapt in order to remain competitive and efficient," said John Gobron, UK Sales Director at Microsoft. "Identity and access management tools help to optimise the clinicians experience of IT and improve their efficiency by providing access to patient data quickly and more securely, whilst suppressing the unnecessary expense of maintaining simple IT processes such as password resets."
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Microsoft is committed to improving health around the world through software innovation. Over the past 13 years, Microsoft has steadily increased its investments in health with a focus on addressing the challenges of health providers, health and social services organizations, payers, consumers and life sciences companies worldwide. Microsoft closely collaborates with a broad ecosystem of partners and delivers its own powerful health solutions, such as Amalga, HealthVault, and a portfolio of identity and access management technologies acquired from Sentillion Inc. in 2010. Together, Microsoft and its industry partners are working to deliver health solutions for the way people aspire to work and live.
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