Clinical impact and value of workstation single sign-on

Background: CHRISTUS Health began implementation of computer workstation single sign-on (SSO) in 2015. SSO technology utilizes a badge reader placed at each workstation where clinicians swipe or "tap" their identification badges. Objective: To assess the impact of SSO implementation in reducing clinician time logging in to various clinical software programs, and in financial savings from migrating to a thin client that enabled replacement of traditional hard drive computer workstations. Methods: Following implementation of SSO, a total of 65,202 logins were sampled systematically during a 7 day period among 2256 active clinical end users for time saved in 6 facilities when compared to pre-implementation. Dollar values were assigned to the time saved by 3 groups of clinical end users: physicians, nurses and ancillary service providers. Results: The reduction of total clinician login time over the 7 day period showed a net gain of 168.3 h per week of clinician time - 28.1 h (2.3 shifts) per facility per week. Annualized, 1461.2 h of mixed physician and nursing time is liberated per facility per annum (121.8 shifts of 12 h per year). The annual dollar cost savings of this reduction of time expended logging in is $92,146 per hospital per annum and $1,658,745 per annum in the first phase implementation of 18 hospitals. Computer hardware equipment savings due to desktop virtualization increases annual savings to $2,333,745. Qualitative value contributions to clinician satisfaction, reduction in staff turnover, facilitation of adoption of EHR applications, and other benefits of SSO are discussed. Conclusions: SSO had a positive impact on clinician efficiency and productivity in the 6 hospitals evaluated, and is an effective and cost-effective method to liberate clinician time from repetitive and time consuming logins to clinical software applications. (c) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.