ORLANDO (HIMSS08 Conference & Exhibition) – Feb. 25, 2008 – Sentillion, the company that created healthcare single sign-on (SSO), announced the availability of Sentillion Tap & Go, a patent-pending, advanced authentication capability that leverages standard passive proximity cards to deliver the easiest sign-on process in the healthcare industry today. With Sentillion Tap & Go, physicians and other caregivers can now roam throughout a defined work area and sign on to different workstations simply by tapping their passive proximity badge against a workstation reader. Further, Sentillion Tap & Go is easy to adopt because it leverages the same badge that organizations use for physical access. Caregivers can now use one badge for entry into the parking lot, building access, as well as single sign-on to their workstation.
With Sentillion Tap & Go, users perform a two-part authentication at the beginning of their shift by tapping their passive proximity card against a card reader and entering their password or providing other verifiable authentication such as a fingerprint biometric. Once this two-part authentication is completed, Sentillion's technology initiates an authentication grace period. During the grace period, the user can access any other shared workstation in a defined area, such as the emergency department, simply by tapping their badge against a reader. Users only need to perform the two-part authentication when their grace period expires or when they move to an area of the hospital with a different Sentillion Tap & Go policy. The duration of the grace period is centrally controlled and can be set for the enterprise or by workstation group, enabling security protocols to be matched to specific clinical venues and patient care workflows.
Leading healthcare organizations including Covenant HealthCare, in Saginaw, Michigan have already begun to leverage this new capability.
"Caregivers and medical staff in our pharmacy and emergency care center use the Sentillion Tap & Go feature to quickly access patient data, without spending time remembering and entering usernames and passwords," said Ray Hall at Covenant HealthCare. "With Sentillion's solution we were able to leverage our prior investment in passive proximity technology to deliver a solution that is easy for the caregivers to use."
"Other vendors attempt to integrate building and network access in a way that requires the user to badge into and out of the facility. If the caregiver fails to do this, they are denied network access and access to their applications. In a healthcare setting this approach can actually prevent caregivers from accessing patient data which can impede patient care and can potentially jeopardize patient safety," said Paul Roscoe, president, Sentillion. "With Sentillion's approach, users have the convenience of using one badge for many purposes, but they are always able to access critical patient information in a secure manner."
This new feature is available in Sentillion's single sign-on solution, expreSSO, as well as the company's Vergence® Clinical Workstation solution version 4.2 or later. Sentillion will be demonstrating Sentillion Tap & Go at the HIMSS08 Conference & Exhibition in booth #6463.
