Continuity in the face of COVID-19

Customers first, always

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1. Ways Imprivata solutions are being used during COVID-19
2. How Imprivata is prepared to address service delivery during this time
3. How to keep Imprivata hardware clean

Ensuring that our customers can quickly and securely deliver care has always been the top priority at Imprivata, and to say that doing so now is “more critical than ever” seems a disservice to the hard work care providers around the world do every day. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, helping our customers provide accurate, expedient, and secure care is, if not more critical than ever, certainly just as critical with an ever-brightening spotlight.

We are honored that hospitals and health systems around the world look to Imprivata as a strategic partner. Imprivata has formed a COVID Response Task Force, a cross-functional group with customer focus at its core, and is working to supply any and all guidance necessary to ensure that our solutions help make care delivery as seamless as possible in the time of COVID-19.

As you activate your emergency preparedness plans, Imprivata is here to support you.

Remote workforceRisk mitigation and responseTelehealth and virtual visits

Supporting staff ramp-up and enabling a remote workforce

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Enabling secure remote work

Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters (like many other customers) is experiencing an increase in remote workers during this crisis. These users need remote network access and this access must be secure. To help customers manage this effort, we are offering licenses to our enterprise multifactor authentication solution — Imprivata Confirm ID for Remote Access — at no-cost for all users. We hope this enables our customers to allow their workforces convenient and secure remote access to networks, applications, and systems. Please contact your Imprivata account team for more details and to receive your complementary licenses.

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Enabling quick, wide-spread access to core applications like Skype

Like many organizations, Virtua Health is experiencing a swift ramp up in remote workforce, including for telehealth and administrative workers. To enable telehealth and ensure continued team collaboration, Virtua needed to provide – and provision – access to many additional users. Using Imprivata Identity Governance, Virtua provisioned access to Skype for approximately 400 additional users – in less than one hour. This process allowed users to immediately start using Skype to complete their remote work while maintaining an audit record of users with access to that application.

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Quickly provisioning providers with appropriate access

Many organizations are needing to shift care providers from their specialties in order to support testing and care of patients with COVID-19. But to maintain security and compliance during this time, those shifts in workforce also need to be paralleled by shifts in what applications they can and should have access to. With Imprivata Identity Governance, customers are able to quickly provision clinicians with access to critical applications they may have not previously had. And with the bulk upload capability within Imprivata Identity Governance, customers can give users faster access without compromising security or an audit trail.

Enabling remote institutional identity proofing for EPCS

Many organizations use the institutional identity proofing model for EPCS, which requires that a provider validate their identity in order to enroll their credentials – a process often designed to take place in person. But due to COVID-19, organizations want to avoid any unnecessary in-person interaction. In-line with new DEA guidance, Imprivata supports remote institutional identity proofing for EPCS through the Supervised Enrollment workflow included with Imprivata Confirm ID for EPCS. Organizations can do this on their own, but Imprivata Professional Services is also available to assume the role of Enrollment Supervisors, enrolling providers on behalf of customers and supporting quick ramp-up.

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Standardizing communications across care teams and remote staff

Across the globe, organizations are moving non-essential staff to remote work in order to prevent exposure, but still need to facilitate secure communications between every user. Organizations are expanding and deploying their use of Imprivata Cortext to enable a single, consistent platform for all members of the organizations, while continuing to ensure security and HIPAA compliance. With Imprivata Cortext, organizations can also broadcast messages for simple mass communication to all users, regardless of location.

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Supporting self-service password resets

Many organizations are increasing their remote workforce — one hospital system in Australia, for example, has about 25% of their employees suddenly being asked to work from home. Most of those employees use Imprivata OneSign with badge access within the walls of the hospital but are unable to do so at home. This requires users to use their passwords instead of badges, with many forgetting their password. But with Self Service Password Reset in place, users have been able to reset their own passwords, reducing help deck calls and allowing IT to focus on more pressing issues.

Quickly verifying the attendance of temporary employees

Many healthcare organizations have been welcoming temporary staff, including doctors and nurses, to help keep up with increased demand due to COVID-19. With this comes the challenge of needing to verify the attendance of those individuals to ensure that they are paid for their work. With Imprivata OneSign, all users – including temporary staff – tap their badge to log in to a system at the start of their shift. Through various workflows, including login activity reports, organizations can easily access data that can be used to verify that a temporary employee started their shift.

Freeing up IT resources for critical tasks by utilizing Imprivata Managed Services

Due to the significant changes being made by many organizations, IT teams have had to rapidly adjust in order to support a remote workforce and virtual workflows. But existing clinical workflows must still be supported, remotely, among all other critical business needs. For example, employees, including new volunteers, must be able to access systems securely. During this time, organizations have used Imprivata Managed Services to administer Imprivata solutions remotely, ensuring continued support for existing clinical workflows while freeing up organization IT resources to focus on other critical tasks.

Enabling new workflows to mitigate risk and manage response

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Identifying users at risk of exposure to infectious disease

Yale New Haven Health is using Imprivata OneSign to identify users who may have been exposed to patients with infectious diseases — and therefore represent a potential risk of spreading the disease.  Imprivata OneSign collects data that identifies user access on workstations in hospital areas where patients with an identified infectious disease are being treated. By matching this data to the location of the workstation, Yale can determine which specific users visited areas with a risk of infection, and can then take any necessary actions.

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Speeding access to clinical staff temperature-check application

A customer plans to require staff to self-check and record their temperature twice per day in order to monitor for potential symptoms, with recordings managed through an in-house web application. To ensure ease-of-use for providers, and support real-time compliance and auditing, they are working with Imprivata to enable single sign-on capabilities, via Imprivata OneSign, into that app.

Streamlining access to symptom-free attestation workflows

Some organizations have started requiring that clinicians demonstrate that they are symptom-free in order to start their shift. In order ensure that the process is simple enough to avoid disrupting patient care and drive compliance, organizations are implementing Imprivata OneSign to ensure easy access to the attestation workflow.

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Ensuring seamless authentications on Microsoft Surface Pros

Nurses at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) use tablets to share patient vitals with remote physicians, and, especially now, need a quick, easy, and near touch-free login experience. CHA will be deploying Imprivata OneSign on Microsoft Surface Pros in their ICU to allow providers to gain access to their tablets with just the tap of a badge. This will reduce the need to touch the screens and help mitigate risk of infection, while still allowing for monitoring of patient vitals.

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Ensuring fast, secure, and compliant care team communications

Relying on traditional methods of viewing test results, and therefore taking action based on those results, could create delays to care – a particular problem for patients who have tested positive for COVID-19. To prevent delays, organizations have developed API integrations with Imprivata Cortext to send fast, secure, and HIPAA compliant alerts to care team members about patients’ lab test results. With those APIs and workflows in place, care team members get real-time alerts, and can take quick action.

Enabling inpatient telehealth consults and virtual patient visits

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Facilitating visitation, despite in-person restriction

Many healthcare organizations have implemented visitation restrictions in order to curb the spread of the virus. In an effort to enable interaction, though, some organizations are planning to offer iPads to patients in order to communicate with would-be visitors. But because these would be shared devices, it’s imperative to ensure that each time a new patient receives an iPad, it has been returned to a “ready state.” To automatically manage the provisioning, usage, and wipe of these devices, organizations are looking to GroundControl, now an Imprivata offering, to help.

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Managing shared iPads for inpatient telehealth consultations

Many organizations are restricting physical contact with COVID-19 patients to reduce exposure to the virus. However, some organizations are planning to give iPads to patients in order to facilitate care by ensuring patients can communicate with clinical staff when telehealth check-ins are appropriate. Because these iPads would be shared, and therefore would need to be configured and returned to a “ready state” for the next patient, organizations are working with Imprivata to implement GroundControl to help manage, secure, and expedite the process.

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Securely communicating with patients and family members

Due to visitation limitations, providers have needed to change the way they think about communicating with patients and their families. Traditional methods of communications, like SMS text and email, might not be secure, could expose PHI, and are not HIPAA-compliant. In order to coordinate visits, for example, organizations are using Imprivata Cortext to send out-of-network communications from care team members to family members. This allows providers to enable secure, convenient, and HIPAA-compliant messaging.

We currently have no disruptions with our proximity, fingerprint reader, keyboard, and palm vein scanner suppliers and are working with each one to ensure ample supply of products for our customers. Many of our suppliers already have redundancy in their supply chain and manufacturing operations to help avoid geographically located disruptions. As the situation evolves, we will continue to work closely with our suppliers to ensure a continued supply of our products.

Information continuity and backup

Imprivata Cloud services are hosted in multiple cloud data centers in the eastern United States. Backups are stored in multiple data centers in a different geographic region for use in disaster recovery. All critical Imprivata Cloud services components are configured in a cluster for fault-tolerance, redundancy, and high availability. Customer data is backed up at least nightly with point-in-time snapshot backups in place for certain types of data. Backups are tested on a quarterly basis to verify recovery point/time objectives and to evaluate disaster recovery procedures. Infrastructure is constantly monitored for service availability and infrastructure health, with immediate issue/warning notifications to 24x7 on-call personnel. Production deployments are done in a rolling fashion by cluster and data center to ensure that run-time fault tolerance and disaster recovery operates as expected. We are in regular communication with our cloud and service partners and are confident in their ability to handle this situation.

• Fingerprint reader care guide
• Palm scanner care guide
• Keyboard care guide