South East Regional Hospital Authority (SERHA)

• Customer Profile

South East Regional Hospital Authority (SERHA) is one of eight health authorities in New Brunswick, Canada. It is a tertiary care centre and maritime referral centre for acute and trauma cases, covering New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and northern Nova Scotia. SERHA, in need of a secure remote access system for its physicians and medical staff, was first to choose AnyWare Group's Role Oriented Access Management (ROAM) technology.

• Industry: Healthcare
• Geographic: Headquartered in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada
• Revenues: 174 Million in 2004/2005
• Employees: 2800
• Physicians: 250
• Patients: Half a million per year

• Business Challenge

With many of their hospitals located in rural areas, SERHA required a system to help provide secure mobile access to their patient information systems, on-line library and administration email. It was imperative that the system be accessed quickly from multiple locations, including private medical offices, medical clinics or their homes using one interface.

We wanted a system that was easy to manage from an IT perspective and the solution needed to be easy to administer and access — ROAM was our answer.

—Jacques Lirette, Chief Information Officer, SERHA

• Solution: AnyWare Group's ROAM Technology

SERHA's rationale for choosing AnyWare Group's ROAM technology:

• Offers SERHA's medical staff the ability to access health records, lab results, x-rays and digital images, clinical data, and other patient information from wherever and whenever they need it.
• Provides the ability to merge the hospital's unique applications, such as Meditech, Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), email, file shares and other vital health information systems on to one secure interface.
• Uses the same security solution, Secure Socket Layer Virtual Private Network (SSL VPN), that government and financial services organizations are presently using.
• Requires no dedicated staff to oversee the IT system and requires minimal maintenance and is extremely simple to administer.
• Is saving SERHA time, effort and money due to an absence of implementing and purchasing expensive equipment.

Since integrating ROAM into our network, our user satisfaction rate has increased substantially. Our users are enjoying the benefits ROAM offers and are now asking for more information to be placed on the portal.

—Jacques Lirette, Chief Information Officer

• Improved Quality of Life for Doctors

Voted as one of Canada's top 100 employers numerous times, SERHA has worked hard to implement strategies to attract top candidates to its health authority. ROAM has played a significant role in aiding these strategies. With the removal of geographical boundaries, ROAM enables doctors and other users to work from home or anywhere an Internet connection is found. For SERHA, the implementation of ROAM was about ameliorating the quality of life for their doctors, IT and administration team.

• Enhanced Health Care for Patients

An innovator in medical care, SERHA believes ROAM has firmly enhanced the quality of health care at its hospitals and credits this unique technology for improving response times and possibly saving the lives of many emergency room patients.

ROAM has been instrumental in expediting health care to patients within SERHA. For example, a radiologist who is on call can now securely view, in real time, an emergency room patient's x-rays from anywhere. Rather than driving many miles to the hospital to make a diagnosis, a doctor can now make an immediate diagnosis, within minutes, from home or wherever they have Internet access.

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