How Green Clinic leveraged remote IT for HIPAA

JACKSON, USA: Bomgar, a player in enterprise remote support solutions, announced that the Green Clinic is using its solution to provide secure, remote support to employees and medical devices within the geographically dispersed healthcare clinic.

Located in Ruston, Louisiana, the Green Clinic was established in 1948 and has since developed into a multi-specialty group practice with approximately 50 physicians and prior to using Bomgar, the Green Clinic's IT department used LogMeIn Rescue and LogMeIn Central to provide remote support to users, but the tools couldn't meet all of their requirements.

In addition to supporting desktop and laptop computers, clinic personnel began relying more heavily on smartphones and tablets to perform their work, and the IT department needed a remote support solution that could support those devices as well.

"Because we're a medical clinic, we can't put support issues on the back burner," said Jason Thomas, IT director and chief information officer for the Green Clinic. "Before Bomgar, when we got a call from one of our remote locations, we often had to send out a support rep to make sure the problem didn't disrupt their work. It was a time-consuming and expensive workflow."

With approximately 450 employees and 700 devices to support, Thomas and his team get a wide variety of support requests. About three and a half years ago, the clinic's IT department deployed a full electronic records management system for its facilities. "We chose a Dell KACE appliance for IT system management as part of that records management solution," said Thomas. "Dell KACE was running a promotion at the time to demo Bomgar. Once we tried it, we knew it was the remote support tool for us. It gave us everything we had with the previous tools and a whole lot more."

Security is another reason the clinic switched to Bomgar. "We have to be HIPAA compliant, so security underlies every single thing we do. We can't afford to have patient information lost or leaked. Our Bomgar B200 appliance is hosted within our firewall, not out in the cloud like the remote support tools we used previously. It also integrates with Active Directory for password authentication," said Thomas. Additionally, Thomas appreciates that Bomgar's Embassy feature enables him to securely control and monitor vendor access to the clinic's network. Using Embassy, Thomas can define privileges for each vendor that needs access to the Green Clinic's network, limiting the systems they can access. Bomgar logs every action a vendor takes while on the network for added security.

Overall, Thomas believes Bomgar plays an integral role in supporting the mission of the Green Clinic. "Our product is not selling things to people. Our product is the care we provide to patients," said Thomas. "If a nurse is tied up at her desk trying to get the system to work, she is not seeing a patient. The doctor then falls behind and we've got people sitting in the waiting rooms longer than necessary. So it all comes down to getting our staff back to providing healthcare as soon as possible. Bomgar is essential to accomplishing that goal."