Solving the HIPAA Compliant Support Headache

Providing secure, reliable remote support to students, faculty and staff is a top priority for all higher education institutions, but it can be particularly important for medical schools. These organizations are often heavily involved in biomedical research and patient care, and it follows that users have sensitive medical information stored on their computers and other devices.

Bomgar recently began working with a nationally renowned medical school to help the organization provide secure, HIPAA compliant support to its user community of more than 5,000 individuals. The technology enables the school to connect to remote machines securely, without posing any risk to the critical data stored on the computer. In addition, Bomgar’s SAML integration provides an extra layer of security that further puts the institution’s mind at ease.

With Bomgar, the school’s support team has a more responsive, efficient approach to issue resolution—something that connectivity challenges with its previous support tool prevented. In addition, the ability to transfer and collaborate on sessions has decreased resolution time, resulting in greater productivity for both the help desk and the school’s users.

The school’s support team is sometimes called upon to support equipment in the classroom, and is utilizing Bomgar Insight to see the problem the professor is experiencing. The technology allows help desk reps to connect to the instructor’s iPhone camera to understand exactly what he or she is looking at. Given that these classroom issues are often simple fixes—for example, an unresponsive projector that needs a cable plugged into the correct port—Bomgar Insight enables much more efficient support with minimal disruption to the class.

Through Bomgar’s reporting capabilities the school estimates that, as a result of implementing the technology, approximately only 3-5% of support requests now require field staff to physically resolve the issue.

This is just one example of the nearly 900 healthcare and more than 750 higher education institutions Bomgar empowers to connect fearlessly to their users and systems. Beth Norzinskay, a project manager for Client Services at Indiana University, says; “It’s unusual to find a solution as versatile and reliable as Bomgar has been for UITS. The solution’s feature set and the support we get from Bomgar is first class. We are very pleased with our decision to use Bomgar.” Annette King, IT director, UNC Health Care IT Service desk, shares the sentiment. She says; “It’s an extremely flexible support solution. The remote support capability enables us to effectively reach anywhere in the hospital system, even otherwise challenging environments such as operating rooms.”

Check out our education case studies and their healthcare counterparts to learn more from other customers in these industries. Balancing HIPAA requirements, end-user productivity and multi-platform support needs is not always easy, but Bomgar is committed to ensuring our customers in these verticals can meet these challenges head on.