Hospital securitySaratoga Hospitals deploy biometrics to increase security and improve efficiency

To improve privacy and security measures, Saratoga Hospital in New York recently announced that it would be partnering with DigitalPersona Inc. to install biometric access controls to verify medical personnel’s identities and increase efficiency.

Saratoga Hospitals operates five remote care facilities in New York where it employs more than 1,700 doctors, nurses, and staff members. Due to the awkward username and password authentication process, hospital officials say they had difficulty accurately tracking access to its sensitive data networks.

“We needed a solution that would encourage our staff to comply with our access control policies without limiting their ability to treat patients and be productive,” explained Gary Moon, Saratoga Hospital’s information systems security analyst, in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare. “Passwords can be cumbersome, and oftentimes the staff would stay logged in to avoid having to manually type a password each time they needed to access patient information. Thus, we could not track who had accessed information.”

In addition, when an individual logged into a computer it would lock the system down, forcing the next user to reboot the system to gain access.

With the help of DigitalPersona’s Pro software and U.are.U Fingerprint Readers, Saratoga employees can now login with a simple swipe of their finger. The system also helps expedite the processing of documents by allowing users to sign electronically with their fingerprints.

The hospital has also deployed more than 200 computers on wheels equipped with fingerprint readers so nurses are now free to move from station to station throughout the day for their various duties. With the new system, nurses no longer have to type their individual name and password up to 100 times a day.

“Because of their workflow, patient information can be left on the screen and viewable,” Moon added. “The speed of fingerprint unlock allows us to set a very short screen lock (five minutes) to protect that information and still let them back in quickly.”