Remote Office & Healthcare Cybersecurity Services for NJ Private Hospital

Client: One of New Jersey’s leading hospitals and one of the few remaining private hospitals in the state. Founded in 1890, it is nationally recognized for clinical excellence and patient safety and serves residents in northern NJ, NY, and beyond in a unique community setting.

CHALLENGES

A large issue stemmed from a lack of in-person IT support; there were simply not enough full-time staffers to manage each and every doctor’s office within the hospital. This led to a hospital-wide lack of responsive IT support and management, and a team focused primarily on troubleshooting rather than evolving and improving support capabilities.

A hospital cannot operate in the fully remote work mode that has gained traction in many organizations as a direct result of adapting to COVID-19. That said, remote access during current (and future) pandemic lockdowns needed to be broadly available to physicians and key staff members. This required a massive extension of remote access capabilities far beyond what had been previously provisioned.

The second major challenge was the hospital’s extremely limited space for computing hardware. Square footage space was precious and allocating more space for hardware was unrealistic; any thought of filling a room with servers was an outright impossibility.

Despite constraints of limited space and IT staff, large-scale virtualization of Englewood’s computing resources is needed to provide the same high level of security typically encountered by Derive’s other healthcare customers. In a medical setting, security is an inherent concern of any virtual app or desktop; regulatory compliance demands that even quite old or outdated data be protected, preserved, and accessible via robust systems and protocols.

Lastly, creeping obsolescence was affecting many existing hardware components and applications. Like other kinds of organizations, hospitals must deal with ongoing lifecycle concerns, but in this situation a number of long-outdated applications needed to be maintained because they served a number of unique and extremely specific medical diagnostic functions. That meant Derive would have to ensure the continuing operation of certain key legacy applications that, in some cases, were no longer supported by the original software providers.

The emergence of COVID-19 necessitated a flexible, secure, high-performance virtual desktop environment (VDI) that could be used by physicians and key staff members anywhere.

GOALS

• FULL VDI: The primary goal of this project was to make available at any time and at any location a collection of key applications and desktop environments — referred to collectively as VDI, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Physicians and key staff members needed access to medical applications, network file access, emails, and much more from their home office or other work environments. Full remote-hosted VDI capability would allow users complete access to their critical applications and data regardless of their physical location.

• BULLETPROOF SECURITY: The new VDI environment had to incorporate top-tier security not only because of increasingly sophisticated and dangerous cybersecurity threats but because of the ultra-sensitive nature of patient medical data. Derive would leverage the full security capabilities and functionality of Citrix ADC to ensure end users had access to the virtual applications they required — without providing any opening to external digital threats.

• PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKS: Another key requirement was the provisioning, through virtual desktop environments, of a set of performance benchmarks for certain medical applications.

PROCESS & HIGHLIGHTS

With a complex mixture of applications and infrastructure components in play — all at different points in their product lifecycles — a thorough understanding of the IT environment was critical before proceeding with selecting recommended solutions.

A key part of Derive’s process was to promote transparency and regular, ongoing communications among all project stakeholders. From frequent standing meetings to regular check-in calls, Derive’s professional service specialists ensured everyone was on the same page and fully cognizant of any issues, milestones achieved, and overall progress to project completion.

Derive assigned a dedicated practice lead who spent 1-2 days per week on-site at the hospital to provide in-person support and guidance, including attending meetings or taking calls as an IT stand-in.

The selection and implementation of Citrix Virtual Desktop allowed the removal of legacy hardware from offices and minimized the physical IT footprint within individual doctor’s offices. Doctors, key staff, and back-office personnel alike shared the ability to manage their applications and core resources remotely.

This was especially transformative for doctors, who were enabled to seamlessly access patient data from point to point. For example, a doctor could open an EMR on their office desktop, then on an office terminal, then on an endpoint device in a patient room. The flexibility to access and manage information securely regardless of location, be it from home, at a remote practice, or any place within the hospital, would be a major boon to productivity.

To ensure the utmost security, Derive leveraged Citrix ADC gateway functionality to provide secure access to any data farm through SSL and mandatory two-factor authentication (2FA); components such as Citrix’s AAA (authentication, authorization, and auditing) traffic management were also deployed. 2FA was separately added to all applications that didn’t already have that protocol natively installed, providing an extra layer of protection both inside and outside of the hospital. Applications with more sensitive resources were layered to restrict access to certain types of information depending on the user’s role.

Users were fully audited and assigned unique permissions, applications, and information only after Derive’s infrastructure audit. Local access restrictions and a disabling of copy/paste functionality prevented users from putting unnecessary information into an already-dense data farm. Management was given the ability to fully control who can access and deploy certain applications.

RESULTS

Virtualization is an iterative process requiring frequent upgrades — the polar opposite of a “one and done” type of project. Derive helped lead the hospital through a critical extension of remote access services. From constant improvements to routine forecasting, Derive continues to supervise the virtualization effort through a dedicated Practice Lead and a revolving team of specialized engineers who regularly offer support, optimizations, and consultations.

In summary, Derive enabled:

• Seamless, secure access to patient data regardless of location
• Reduced reliance on in-person support team
• Decreased need for staff to visit remote sites
• Fewer resources allocated to manage endpoint devices y Improved overall IT responsiveness to ad-hoc support needs
• Lower infrastructure maintenance requirements

Derive’s unique ability to jump in on very short notice and expand the staff IT team, or help with any unusual issues, enables the hospital’s staff to handle the unexpected. Derive professionals can take meetings on the hospital’s behalf, handle the inevitable “fire drill” IT calls, and act as their trusted solution partners.

For more information about Derive Technologies BOOK A FREE CONSULTATION  or contact us at marketing@derivetech.com or call +1 212-363-1111