NE trust overhauls account management

University Hospital Of North Durham

County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust is to become a reference site for Microsoft’s ProVision, which automates the creation and management of user accounts for healthcare employees.

The move is part of a three-phase approach to improving password management, sign-on, and account provisioning at the trust.

Craig Robinson, IT support manager, told eHealth Insider its service desk had been under pressure from provision requests, user calls and lost password calls from its 6,500 employees.

Then, in April, the trust merged with County Durham and Darlington Community Health Services, which added a further 2,500 employees, and made new systems essential.

“Back at the end of 2009, we [the trust] were subject to a KPMG audit, and one of the things that came out for my area of responsibility was that we did not have any single sign-on or provisioning,” Robinson said.

“Two hundred user provision requests were coming in by post or fax, and we didn’t have some basic checks in place; such as an authenticating signature.

“In addition, 70% of our calls were password related, either for the Active Directory or other systems. We wanted to reduce that, so our staff could deal with other calls more effectively.

“So we created a business case for a phased scheme for password reset, single sign-on and user provisioning.”

The trust looked at a number of products to deliver the programme, before choosing Microsoft’s identity and access management, Microsoft/Sentillion’s expreSSO single sign-on and Microsoft/Sentillion’s proVision.

The merger between the acute and community trusts was agreed as part of the Department of Health’s Transforming Community Services Programme, which was completed at the end of March.

Robinson said he made sure the deal with Microsoft could be extended to the additional 2,500 desktops that his team suddenly had to look after on 4 April.

“The CHS merger made the project even more essential,” Robinson said. “We have been able to do password reset and single sign-on for them from day one; so even though the volume of calls has increased we have been able to deal with those extra calls.”

Robinson said the acute trust’s employees will see benefits from the project over time. The service desk was unable to support staff who needed to reset their passwords outside office hours, including those who worked at night.

Automatic password reset means they can reset their own passwords. Since the service desk had no way of checking who was making a password reset call, the security of passwords has also been improved.

Single sign-on should mean that staff have fewer user names and passwords to remember. ProVision will initially apply to the trust’s Active Directory and Electronic Staff Record, but may be extended to clinical systems in the future.

“In terms of provisioning, we have so far done base provisioning, but we made sure we could extend it in the future, without spending a lot more money,” Robinson said.

He added that the IT department expected to save the equivalent of a whole time staff member from the implementation of password management and single sign-on, and that provisioning should create further efficiency savings.