Under Their Thumbs

A hospital's effort to secure laptops and removable devices generates user resistance.

 

March 29th, 2010

Courtesy of Health Data Management Magazine

For Wes Wright, three thefts were enough. Serving as chief technology officer at Seattle Children's, a 250-bed pediatric hospital, Wright is charged with maintaining network and data security. The theft of a handful of laptops, from auto and home break-ins, convinced him to take pre-emptive action to plug a glaring hole.

The hospital's EHR and protected patient information reside on a secure network. But with 1,200 laptops in circulation, it was very tempting-and easy-to transfer files off the network onto a laptop. "We encourage users to store data on their personal drive on the network," he says. "But laptops being laptops, if someone is working on a spreadsheet, they're going to download the file onto the laptop so they can work on the airplane."

Wright turned to a vendor, San Francisco-based Guardian Edge, that he had seen in action at his previous employer, Scripps Healthcare in San Diego. The Guardian Edge software encrypts the hard drive of a laptop as soon as it accesses the network. The full-disk encryption program is transparent to the user, adds Robert Brockman, technical project manager, who served as project manager for the software roll-out, which began 18 months ago. For laptop users, the initial log-on-during which the laptop was encrypted-required more time, about two minutes more, before the user could access the system. But after that, subsequent log-ons returned to normal speed.

Once a laptop is encrypted, any data on it is protected from unauthorized use. Decryption of the data occurs when the user logs in with their ID and password. Even if a thief managed to activate the computer, they could not access any data on it, Wright says. The laptop encryption effort was completed by the summer of 2009, Wright says.

In one case, a staff member attempted to open up a Powerpoint presentation on his thumb drive. Because the presentation included some material copied from the network, the file became encrypted. To extract the data, users must go through several steps, moving the data to a special folder, then providing their password. "The software works well, but it is not user-intuitive," Brockman says. In this case, the user changed the file name extension and attempted to open the presentation again. That led to a corrupted file.

The thumb drive encryption program is set to only encrypt newly added files from the network. The software could be set to encrypt the entire thumb drive once it touched the network, similar to the laptop set-up. However, Seattle Children's is still deciding whether to take that extra step. "Some folks keep pictures of their birthdays and kids on their thumb drives," Wright says

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