Vendor Remote Support

Wed, 3 Feb 2016 17:45:15 GMT

I'm looking to get some input from other large institutions, hospitals, universities, and even very large private practices.

With all of the attention on security breeches, HIPAA, and what not, how have your IT Cyber Security Teams reacted?

Has anyone experienced any push back from their IT regarding Vendors using their own web-based remote support solutions to troubleshoot and repair instrument/software problems?

Curious how other sites may be dealing with these issues.

Thanks

Wed, 3 Feb 2016 18:22:31 GMT

IS (information services) or IT doesnt really allow it at our hospital, but we dont have our IS team directly work with our imaging systems. Sometimes our IS team- treat medical systems too much like computers and have made distastrous mistakes. We navigate via Medical Engineering who liaises with IT.

At any rate, our medical engineering team wavers on letting vendors remote in. Sometimes they allow it (mostly secretly I think) and other times they dont allow it. I think alot of this depends on how closely they are being monitored by IS.

Tue, 9 Feb 2016 18:17:28 GMT

We are a large private practice, not sure we have an IT Cyber Security team, but our MO is basically that our IT contractor supports for the Institute's PCs, Phone system and networking. When it comes to vendor's equipment (Spectralis/HB) we have allowance to let them remotely log into their systems and find the problems etc.

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 17:35:05 GMT

We also let vendors remote in to help troubleshoot issues with our systems. We have a private company that does our IT services but they are strictly medical IT services and they don't give us any grief about it. I certainly don't want them to try and fix a imaging system hardware issue, not to mention it would probably void our service contracts with the vendor.