By TerryAnn Fitzgerald
The final areas of the enterprise sure to be impacted by electronic health records (EHRs) are the branch office and the remote worker. Both tend to be at a distance from IT, and as a result present different challenges than their campus LAN and data center counterparts.
Let’s begin with the role that the branch office will play in an EHR rollout. It’s quite significant since physicians’ offices outside of the hospital, clinics, imaging facilities and even partner billing companies are all a type of branch office for the health care system. They need to share data with the main network, but have to do so across the WAN.
To ensure the privacy of patient information and to comply with patient privacy regulations, IT must encrypt data end-to-end and create secure tunnels. This could be difficult without management tools that can recognize and manage routers, switches and other branch infrastructure as well as control access at the user and device level.
IT will require an overarching management system that can apply institutional and regulatory policies to branch office activities surrounding EHR. For instance, an MRI technician should be able to load a patient’s MRI image into his electronic record, but not be able to access his recent lab reports. A sophisticated enterprise-wide management tool would be able to deploy, enforce and update centralized policies at the branch level.
Additionally, most hospitals don’t have a plethora of IT staff to handle branch technical issues. An automated, centralized and – in some cases – virtualized switching environment would help health care IT support the widespread use of EHR, and its expanded infrastructure, without having to add headcount.
Deploying these services in a multi-service router platform that supports routing, switching, security, voice and wireless replaces discreet devices, conserving valuable power and space. A consolidated platform that can be pre-configured, shipped and remotely managed also reduces service calls and saves money as well as power and space in often constrained branch environments.
IT would be able to manage its branch infrastructure using a standard image monitored from a centralized console. Once that gear was up and running, IT could remotely and automatically push updates, patches and other critical maintenance tasks that would otherwise require on-site visits from tech staff.
If systems were somehow corrupted, IT could dial back to a recent stored image saved to a central repository – again, without having to send out a technician.
Such tools would also provide IT a single view of all branch devices from a central console, enabling concise fault analysis and remediation. These sophisticated management tools make it possible for one person to easily monitor and manage thousands of sites.
The same can be said of the remote user environment. IT could enable users such as home workers, independent diagnostics personnel, medical image interpreters and even patients themselves to access information within EHR systems without compromising security or privacy.
The centralized management system that controls the data center, campus LAN and branch offices can also be used to set policies for remote user and device access. For instance, IT could set rules that restrict diagnostics professionals from reading data on an unauthorized mobile device. That kind of granularity would ensure the highest level of productivity without risking data leaks.
These management tools would also provide incredible flexibility. Healthcare organizations could set up seasonal flu clinics that securely pull and push patient data in and out of EHR systems from remote, or even temporary, locations.
IT could also take advantage of centralized management to ensure that no single user or branch is saturating the network. By monitoring traffic closely, IT could improve capacity planning and budgeting for infrastructure upgrades.
The combination of intelligent management software and intelligent switches and routers would enable IT to easily and cost-effectively handle EHR rollouts to branch offices and remote workers.
In the next blog, we’ll dive into strategies for securing EHR in the wireless enterprise.
Tags: Clinics, EHR, Imaging Facilities, Physician Offices
