VA hospitals test single sign-ons

Veterans Affairs hospitals in Oakland, Calif., Seattle and Silver Spring, Md., are testing the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s new Enterprise Single Sign-on Facility software and plan to deploy it to all 170 VA hospitals by month’s end.Meanwhile, hospital system administrators are working out ESSO’s quirks and making sure security is in place. Running in Microsoft Windows NT environments, ESSO eventually will give each VA doctor a personal identification number and password for access to any VA hospital record nationwide.“That’s where it will be, that’s not where it’s at today,” said Bill Majerski, ESSO project manager at NIST. Doctors currently have to maintain up to 170 PINs and passwords, one for each hospital in the system. Before they can each enjoy the luxury of one PIN and password for everything, Majerski said, VA hospitals will have to set policies for records access. “Developing is one thing, testing is another thing, deploying is the big step,” Majerski said. “It’s a very big step.”