Fairfield Medical Center, an acute-care facility in central Ohio, has deployed single sign-on technology from Lexington, Mass.-based Imprivata.

Fairfield executives say they chose the technology for its ease-of-use and its inherent ability to gain access to McKesson applications. They also cited the minimum impact n employee workflow.

"Doctors have choices where they practice," said Sky Gettys, chief financial officer of Fairfield Medical Center. The ease of using Imprivata OneSign is a key ingredient to creating a more productive working environment and attracting and retaining staff, which ultimately leads to more referrals."

Gettys said that within the medical center the Imprivata OneSign solution practically sold itself.

"Once our employees tried it, they fully embraced it and encouraged their colleagues to sign-up," Gettys said.

Fairfield Medical Center officials said the center had password management challenges common in the healthcare sector. For staff to quickly access the data they needed, when they needed it, they had to remember several different application passwords. With an abundance of passwords, constant calls to the helpdesk for password resets sapped productivity of both the IT and the medical staff.

Imprivata's appliance-based single sign-on for healthcare solution has provided Fairfield with self-service password reset for medical staff who continuously access six to eight password-enabled applications daily.

"One of the biggest helpdesk calls was for password resets.," Gettys said. "This system allows us to reduce these costs, and already we have seen a 50 percent drop in call volume by our enabled physicians."

"The security of patient data is a critical concern for all healthcare organizations today; but equally important is delivering solutions that increase staff productivity and deliver cost savings during these challenging economic times," said Rob Cote, vice president of sales and marketing at Viopoint, the company that implemented OneSign at Fairfield Medical Center. "Fairfield sought a practical solution to the password management issues that was easy to deploy and easy for users to adopt -- Imprivata OneSign delivered as promised."