Scott Dodds, CEO, Ultima discusses the practicalities of remote working, and how hospitals who join forces can be networked together to help save lives.
It’s a critical time for healthcare services and their workers, not only for front-line staff but also for all their support workers as well. While doctors and nurses are in hospitals and primary care settings, they can’t do their jobs effectively without their usual back-up support. Having the correct IT infrastructure in place is key to keeping the people who support them working remotely.
Until now, IT infrastructure has perhaps been further down the list of priorities for some healthcare providers, but COVID-19 has brought IT into the limelight an essential tool for allowing homeworking to keep people safe. The good news is that there is much healthcare providers can be doing immediately to transition support workers to home working, and to ensure your IT is capable of handling the demands of the COVID-19 crisis.
Remote working made simple and secure
You can set up remote working in just three days, and this can be done remotely too. Remote working will give healthcare support workers the ability to access their office workstation from any device or browser. There are solutions available that will provide workers access to the applications they need to work on and data to work with while working remotely. They are packed in a service that is easy to deploy, easy to manage and from the user’s perspective, easy to consume. Security is inherent in these solutions, with native Multi Factor Authentication ensuring the safety of user credentials and data protection policies preventing data from leaving the boundaries of your security perimeter.
There are also collaboration tools that can be deployed quickly – within hours – and we can take care of the licensing, deployment and varying usage needs of individual healthcare providers. Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex offer file sharing capabilities as well as calling and video conferencing from any location. They are secure and are being offered on a six months free trial basis.
As the balance shifts to using company-provisioned assets from all potential locations, ensuring that endpoints continue to comply with device, content and application-based security policies before accessing corporate data and services is paramount.
Ultima is also able to set up device management services remotely within six days so that all corporate devices can be secured and managed by one central point no matter where employees are working. This means your devices are being managed and monitored to ensure security and compliance. This is crucial as it’s possible healthcare providers will come under attack from modern security threats and ransomware as the service is holding more money than usual. For example, with the latest Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools, you can automate reviews of individual users which will red- flag when someone logs on at a strange time or place to normal.
And what if your remote devices go wrong? Service providers have engineers who are working remotely 24/7 and can access devices remotely and fix them. We also have spare components for devices if needed and can put spares on-site at no extra charge. At Ultima we are putting our healthcare providers first in all our work and responding to IT needs within hours so that we can ensure front line workers and their support staff can get on with the job in hand without interruption.
Joining IT infrastructures across hospitals
We know from our work with leading NHS Trusts that they are likely to need to link up with private hospitals to provide the beds and care that the current crisis demands. To help those hospitals share resources and information, they need to have their IT networks joined. This is something that Ultima can do and will do as a matter of urgency. If there is an internet line available, we can support, manage and secure joined up IT. We can deliver appropriate firewalling and segmentation between the two parties as well as ensure secure lines in and out for joined-up remote working.
With a huge increase in the number of healthcare practitioners returning to work, there are ways of automating new starter processes that have been tried and tested. They can reduce the necessary paperwork down to a matter of hours rather than weeks, which means returners can start working quicker.
We are very agile; we are here to help healthcare providers ensure that front line workers can work with their remote colleagues effectively and to help hospitals join forces when needed. With the right systems and back-up in place, IT will be an effective enabler in the war on COVID-19.
For further information please contact Ultima on 0333 015 8000.
