WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED
The next step was choosing an actual physical authentication method that would aid Cincinnati Children's in its drive to reduce paperwork, work with the Epic software, satisfy the Ohio Board of Pharmacy and Epic technical requirements, and increase the accuracy and efficiency in handling prescription medications, all without hampering practitioners' ability to prescribe and dispense medications.

The only way to make absolutely sure the biometric/token authentication system was workable was to conduct a pilot test with clinicians in a live setting. Cincinnati Children's documented its evaluation using an annotated matrix, in which IT scored each product based on usability, technical implementation, support, and security. The organization chose RSA's Secure ID tokens and Sentillion Identix fingerprint readers for its Secure Authentication program.

Either authentication method can be used within Epic to authorize the prescription or dispensing of medicines. Cincinnati Children's chose to support both because fingerprint biometrics, although efficient for practitioners, requires fingerprint readers at every workstation that might be used to enter prescriptions into Epic. This isn't always possible: Authorized users might be in an office or clinic within the hospital that doesn't have fingerprint readers, but they still must be able to prescribe medications or document that medications were administered. Tokens like RSA SecureID are a simple-to-use, portable authentication method that satisfy regulations and aren't tied to specific workstations.

In addition, fingerprint readers won't work when the clinician is wearing gloves or, in rare cases, when an employee simply doesn't have clear enough fingerprints to be usable. Cincinnati Children's selected RSA's SecureID tokens as an alternative so practitioners who can't (or won't) use a fingerprint reader can still authorize medications.

Epic Software provides native support for both RSA's Ace Server, used to authenticate the SecureID tokens, and Identix fingerprint readers. During the configuration and rollout of Epic at Cincinnati Children's, IT administrators simply add the required authentication methods into the Epic transaction system, defining which transactions require token or fingerprint authentication.

Illustration by Brian Stauffer

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