Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center (OLOL) is an 850-bed hospital located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The organization has 3,200 employees and a medical staff of more than 1,000 physicians who provide a full range of services and innovative healing programs.

The Challenge: Secure Physician Access to Patient Information via the Internet

To assist in handling the challenges of today’s managed care requirements, OLOL wanted to create a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that would give physicians fast and secure Internet-based access to clinical applications running on the company’s Citrix MetaFrame servers. “We wanted to find a way for doctors to access our core clinical applications from anywhere, allowing them to spend less time with paperwork and more time with patients,” said Shannon Simpson, OLOL MIS director. “But with confidential patient information at stake, we had to find a solution that not only met the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but would be flexible enough to deploy in many different networking and firewall environments.”

Implementing Citrix Extranet VPN Software

A longtime user of Citrix MetaFrame software, OLOL worked with TECHMASTER, a Gold-level member of the Citrix Solutions Network™, to implement Citrix Extranet VPN software. “Within three months, we were ready to deploy LakeMD.com, our secure Web site for physicians,” said Simpson.

Using Citrix Extranet, LakeMD.com currently provides 120 doctors with a secure, Internet-based access to a wide range of critical health care applications running on the company’s MetaFrame servers, including Cerner’s HNA Millennium products. Instead of dialing-up over phone lines, users now connect rapidly via the secure VPN that employs authentication, access control and encryption. Observed Simpson, “With LakeMD.com, physicians can access our systems from their homes, their offices - really anywhere - they can prescribe medication, order labs, view test results, as well as review and approve medical records. They have the identical functionality over the Internet as they do inside the hospital.”

Fostering the Spirit of Healing While Saving Time, Lowering Costs

Using Citrix Extranet software, OLOL easily met and exceeded the security guidelines specified by HIPAA. But it was the ability to deploy and manage clients quickly and easily that made the solution ideal. “Because the Extranet client easily installs on the remote user’s device, typical registration and setup takes less than five minutes,” said Greg Bourgeois, OLOL LAN manager. “From a technical standpoint, we don’t have to manage inbound remote access server (RAS) connections to our MetaFrame servers. Nor do we have to manage - and pay for -modem banks, PBX system expansion and phone lines to support users.”

OLOL has found other ways to extend the use of its secure VPN. When Bourgeois needed to provide a San Diego-based consultant with medical records for revenue management analysis, he used the VPN. “I was able to connect the consultant to our records system in 30 minutes, providing instant access to thousands of records while still maintaining absolute control and security.”

In the future, OLOL will explore the possibility of extending the VPN to give both employees and the community access to applications for remote enrollment in health-related programs, such as diet, exercise and smoking cessation. The hospital will also allow its remote transcriptionists to use VPN-hosted, Internet-based streaming audio to listen to doctor dictation and type transcriptions directly into the clinical application. Noted Bourgeois, “With Extranet, we can centrally manage remote user privileges and ensure that the transcriptionists have access to only the servers needed to run their particular applications. And by migrating the transcription effort to the Internet, we estimate savings of more than 40 percent on these particular phone bills, about $6,000 a year.”

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