SEATTLE – As Northwest Hospital & Medical Center braces itself for the major push involved in rolling out its new clinical automation system this month, Chief Technology Officer Ken Burton is relieved to have one very pesky IT job already off his desk.

Northwest Hospital, a 282-bed facility in north Seattle, recently completed installation of Internet security software to safeguard all of its 1,200 computers.

The implementation of eTrust PestPatrol Anti-Spyware, developed by Islandia, N.Y.-based Computer Associates, is aimed at preventing the ever-growing adware and spyware attacks on Northwest Hospital's 1,700 employees' computers.

All those pop-ups were accompanied by a slowdown in performance day after day. The problem, which became more serious during the past year, also prompted dozens of calls a day to the IT department, Burton said.

Those calls often required someone from the 40-member IT team to go the PC to handle the problem. "You're already busy with a bunch of work," Burton said. "Onesies and twosies is one thing," he said, but the calls were mounting day by day. Something had to be done.

After researching a number of options, Burton and his team turned to Computer Associates for help. A test run revealed even more spyware intrusion attempts than Burton had expected.

Many organizations are not aware of the extent to which their computers are under attack – or vulnerable to attack – by malicious software, said Kelly Mackin, director of the eTrust development group for Computer Associates.

By the time Computer Associates entered the picture at Northwest Hospital, Burton had already concluded that free anti-spyware software could not do the job.

Today, after six months in operation with the Computer Associates software, Burton said the problem has been solved. "It's cleaned things up," he said. "It's gone from an issue to a done deal."

Done, for now, perhaps. Network security and HIPAA compliance need continuous attention, said Marc Borbas, security analyst at Sophos, a network security company in Lynnfiled, Mass. Often, it's treated like a check-box initiative, he said.

"It's a significant challenge," Borbas said. "The first piece is how do you secure all the machines in the operation." Then throw mobile users into the mix, and it becomes more complicated.Burton agrees that security is really never a done deal. He's now looking for software that runs in real time without noticeably slowing down the hospital's computers, and he'd like one tool to handle all the security instead of having "one tool for this, one tool for that."

"The current proliferation of applications makes it hard to efficiently monitor the organization's security status in real time," said Chris Noell, vice president of business development at Solutionary, a managed security services firm with headquarters in Omaha, Neb. Leading hospitals are starting to invest in managed security services providers or security management information software to consolidate disparate applications into a consolidated security dashboard, Noell said.

For now, Burton will rely on the security he has in place. Next up at Northwest is the first phase of a three-part implementation of Siemens Medical Solutions' Soarian suite that includes an electronic patient record system.