AKRON, OH – Summa Health System, a healthcare network that serves a five county region in northeast Ohio, has gone live with Sentillion's single sign-on technology for more than 4,000 caregivers.

Summa Health selected technology from Andover, Mass. Sentillion. Sentillion's Vergence clinical workstation includes SSO, advanced authentication and context management, to help manage secure access to its network while giving clinicians instant access to all the applications they need to make clinical decisions.

Summa Health System's primary health information system, Eclipsys SCM, along with other key clinical applications are distributed to caregivers via a Citrix published application strategy. Summa Health executives say they selected Sentillion in part because of its expertise and success with this mixture of technology.

In addition, as Summa Health System computerized its patient records it found that physicians and nurses could not efficiently access electronic data spread across multiple clinical applications. Prior to implementing Sentillion's clinical workstation solution, caregivers used multiple passwords to access and locate the patient's record in each application.

"SSO and context management enabled us to create a quick win with our caregivers as we were able to both simplify their workflow by speeding access to multiple applications and enable them to better manage patient data," said Greg Kall, CIO for Summa Health System. "In addition, Sentillion's close partnership with Eclipsys, our primary health information system vendor, significantly enhanced our ability to roll out the solutions within our specified timeframe and budget."

Today, says Kall, when a Summa Health System caregiver provides their user name and password, they are quickly and securely authenticated and signed into Summa Health Systems' health information systems, which include Eclipsys, SoftMed, OptiLink, Teletracking and AGFA. Additionally, the need to search for patients in multiple applications is eliminated since context management automatically tunes the applications to the selected patient's identity.

"At the time of go-live, each clinician participated in a five minute enrollment for single sign-on, along with a brief one-on-one review session," said Pam Banchy, system director of clinical information systems for Summa Health System.