From the January 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Kadlec Health System, a 270-bed non-profit in Richland, Wash., recently adopted Good Technology for their new BYOD approach. CIO Dave Roach said they had been a “Blackberry shop” for many years, and had bought and provided Blackberries free of charge to their employees. But times change, and recently they decided to let some staff bring their own devices, for which they would each get two free Good licenses. Roach reckons they have about 160 employees using it now, mostly for the scheduling calendar and work e-mails (not accessing electronic health records).

“We don’t worry for instance what they’re loading onto the device,” he told DOTmed News. “Because we live within Good, we don’t care what they do outside of Good.”


People and Passwords
But Kadlec’s new BYOD approach did bring with it some questions from personnel. Because people were bringing in their own phones, the health system had to be sensitive about what to do with lost or stolen devices. For instance, Roach said they decided that missing items would not be entirely remotely wiped – only the data on the e-mail and calendar, the protected enterprise stuff containerized by Good, would be purged.

Roach said the reason is that staff might be reluctant to report a lost device if they were afraid their private pictures or whatever else was on their phone would be erased. “They’ll never report it,” he said. “Ever.”

In fact, Roach said staff resistance contributed to the biggest policy challenge in setting up the BYOD. That was convincing the C-suite to agree to input a six-character password every time they want to use their phones to check their e-mail or schedule a meeting.

“Certainly the biggest hassle, the biggest pushback I get, is setting that password,” he said. “The device is meant to be pulled out at a moment’s notice out of your shirt pocket and looked at, and it’s a hassle to have to type a password every time.”

So Roach did some experimenting. Roach said he played around with different password settings – four, six, or eight characters, timeouts of various lengths – till he reached a “hassle factor” hospital staff would be willing to accept. And, eventually, they did.

“The risk of ending up on the OCR wall of shame was too great,” he said. “Hospitals wind up in the newspaper at a moment’s notice. Do you really want to be in that position?”

Roach said it points to one of main challenges for health care CIOs, and the one that underlies the whole BYOD dilemma. “It’s security versus usability, and I can err on either side and screw up.”

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