Queensland Health’s $5.4 million project to enable rapid sign-on for clinicians for quicker and easier access to electronic medical records back is on track after a rocky start.
Queensland Health first signalled its intention to introduce a single sign-on for clinicians to access the department’s numerous clinical and administration applications, which currently each require an individual logon, in April last year.
But the project stalled, and was moved to ‘amber’ status (meaning it was ‘pushing the bounds of tolerance') on the Queensland Government’s ICT dashboard, as the department waited for governance to be finalised.
The project has now moved to ‘green’, or ‘to plan’, status, as the department approaches the market for a provider of the solution.
The use of a single sign-on will mean clinicians no longer need to re-authenticate each time they want to access a new application, and would also cut down on the time associated with the inevitable resetting of forgotten passwords - time the department doesn’t have, given the limited number of workstations currently accessible.
“The current approach could result in clinicians being locked out of systems as their passwords have expired,” the department said in tender documents.
“This would ultimately impact on patient services with clinicians unable to access vital information.”
The department expects the project to be completed by the start of December this year.
It will trial the “rapid access workstation service” with 1000 shared workstations and 10,000 users across nine sites once a provider has been selected.
Queensland Health currently has an implementation of an out-of-support version of Novell Secure Login as part of its standard operating environment build, which is generally used in high-traffic clinical areas.
The new solution will need to integrate with Queensland Health’s Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases.
The department employs 77,700 staff across 17 hospitals and health services.
