108: Healthcare Web SSO: How IGEL and Imprivata Are Simplifying Clinical Access

Stuart Donnelson: Hello, this is Stu Donaldson with XenTegra and with me I’ve got Chris Feeney from iGel and this is another episode of iGel Weekly. Welcome to everybody. How are doing today, Chris?

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Well, sir, it’s always great to be back online and talking about some of our favorite things. So looking forward to ⁓ opportunity to do that today.

Stuart Donnelson: Yeah, yeah, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks. Hard to get together, but I think we have a good one for everybody today. One of the things that ⁓ been doing on the last couple of episodes is talking a lot about ⁓ was announced at iJail now and next earlier year when that conference was ⁓ down Miami. Man, I can’t believe it’s been almost a ⁓ whole But one of the coolest things that we saw announced was ⁓ this ⁓ idea Web SSO. ⁓ right and how that’s gonna really change things for iJail. Now ⁓ we had fortunate, unfortunately we had, excuse Ampropada’s ⁓ CEO stage to help explain that. You wanna tell our audience a little bit about what that announcement was and why it’s so unique?

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Yeah, so for those that know my background, I spent the majority of my career at Improvata ⁓ coming to IGEL. So was sort of a coming back home ⁓ kind of And so what was very exciting is about five or six years ago, we began having discussions with Improvata about of additional use cases and stuff that we could try to do on IGEL. And so took some time to get some of that, but one of the more exciting ones that has always been out there, but we able to finally bring it to the big stage and announce it, which involved bringing ⁓ Fran Roche, their on stage to do it as sort of the seamless SSO into a web browser. And so that had never been done with respect to non-Windows endpoints. And so, and obviously bringing the familiar badge tap experience that obviously a lot of healthcare customers have enjoyed for a very long time and not wanting to sort of change that experience, but sort of add it as another component to it. But it also was great because things have greatly changed in the world of, you know, medical record delivery systems. And more specifically with some of the big ones out there between Epic and Cerner, now Oracle and Meditech. and many more and they’re all going to a browser adding functionality. so ⁓ we working jointly with Invervada on this and so we had a chance to announce it and we also had a demo there at the show and so we’ll be talking about it today in our episode.

Stuart Donnelson: Great, great, awesome. So badge tap narrative that you’ve been talking about, is something that’s been around for ⁓ quite while. Why is that ⁓ essentially the standard for what our clinical partners out there want? Can you tell us a little bit about just ⁓ that process in I know most of our audience probably is already well aware ⁓ of what ⁓ badge tap looks like in most environments, but. From a clinical perspective, why is this so important? And again, you mentioned that we’re moving to a web-based world, right? So having that ability in this web-based world as it’s pertaining to where medical record software is going is a big deal, obviously. But what is that?

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s really an authentication mechanism, right? ⁓ The vast majority of healthcare providers are wearing some kind of identification badge and those badges are used to get into the parking lot, get into the building, getting, you know, pay for stuff. And so it’s always had sort of this proximity type functionality. And so years ago, one of the challenges where Improvata kind of got started in healthcare was they had a solution to remove passwords. but they didn’t necessarily have a better way to have the user authenticate. They still had to walk up, type in their domain password, and then Embraida would single sign on them into their other applications. And so what began emerge was, that’s great, but still not fast enough or convenient enough. And so.

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: What emerged was additional authentication measures to do that. Improvata actually started off as a biometrics company many years ago. so the way, it’s one of these things where people started using ⁓ phones or for different things. It became sort of, hey, I’m already using this. Why not just leverage it? And so what emerged was, hey, just walk up, tap my card, and tap in and tap out.

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Right. And so and then what happens after that was a little automation of this. And so it just happened to emerge right as the a lot of things were shifting in health care. Right. There was a big and also in the use space with respect to virtualization. Citrix had already been doing delivery of applications and desktops. And then, of course, VMware merges and has their thing. And then you start seeing.

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm. Right.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: thin clients begin to emerge with Teradici devices and then Dell and others and so it sort of all came around the same amount of time and then you know and and but you know it just rapidly showed the benefit of walking up instead of typing your password or whatever just tap your badge and you know maybe a password once in a while or so whatever and so it became sort of a pseudo thing and and it just spread like wildfire now it’s sort of

Stuart Donnelson: You’re right. Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: pretty much the de facto standard out there in healthcare. It’s pretty amazing to be able to see that in my career.

Stuart Donnelson: Right, absolutely. that’s, I got my start in healthcare as well, and this is what we were starting to get asked to do. One of the things I think is cool here is that we can take what has essentially been over last decade, I’m going say, it wasn’t overly complex, but we had a lot of layers, right, that we were dealing with. We had a lot of different technologies and different things that we had to strap together to make all this work, right? Now, if we’re talking about going to a cloud app, we’ve removed the reliance on doing anything other than publishing a desktop, right? Or even publishing it, just going straight to that desktop. Or excuse me, I said desktop, I meant web browser. Going straight to that web browser as opposed to doing it with inside of a virtual world. So we’ve got the ability there maybe to eliminate some hurdles for people. And then there’s you know, just the idea of, this again, coming from a healthcare background, one of the things that I always ran into was this idea of,

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Yeah.

Stuart Donnelson: in friction. so time you increase the amount of time a provider it takes for them to get logged into a system and back to working, ⁓ that their day incrementally and then keeps doing that with every single patient. You got a doctor that’s seen 40 plus patients a day, even 30 seconds ends up being a substantial amount of time that they’re delayed from doing what other work they might have to do and then ultimately getting home to their families. That’s all we all want to do.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Yeah, well, it’s even more interesting is in the world of healthcare, the probably the more unique thing that stands out is the use of shared workstations. ⁓ There are other industries that do that, but in healthcare, it’s pretty much a common thing, but there are challenges at the shared workstation level where you have people coming and going. so you’ve also had applications like Microsoft Office where their licensing models changed or licensing.

Stuart Donnelson: Right.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: subscriptions change and so you know if you just need to check email or like that you don’t necessarily need a full version of Office for that. So Microsoft came out with different licensing models. One those is very common. It called F3 which is you know frontline license whatever like that but it’s browser based access only. So on these shared workstations as as ⁓ you know the course of time and versions you know came and went in the Microsoft licensing and things shifted to the cloud. use of a browser became, you know, that’s all I need to get to this or SharePoint site or whatever. And I still need to be able to check that along with maybe looking at stuff in the in the ⁓ medical record And so it’s sort of common thing. But one of the other things with respect to delivering that from a virtualization is it’s inherently expensive to just publish a browser from a back end server.

Stuart Donnelson: Right, absolutely.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: And one of our healthcare customers early on was telling us, know, I can I want a browser on iJail you guys have it just I would love to be able to use it and have single sign on Because if I have to do it if I have to publish edge for example from my citric servers I got to spin up more servers capacity for that’s more expensive. And so So this has been you know for us we’ve had been having these conversations, you know For probably at least, you know four years minimum

Stuart Donnelson: At least, yeah.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: ⁓ And so here we are finally bringing to market with the launch of ⁓ a new version of our Agile agent for Improvata where we can deliver the to get into that browser as the user that tapped their badge. So it’s very exciting to see how ⁓ this come along and ⁓ what about to launch here this ⁓ early part of the summer actually. ⁓

Stuart Donnelson: I would make an argument too with everything that’s going on. hate to beat a dead horse here, but the fun having with AI and hardware right now, right? We’ve got to really start thinking about how it is, we going to, ⁓ how are going to grow and be able to adapt our businesses ⁓ if can’t get when we need it, right? So we’ve got the ability to talk about the sustainability piece where we can reuse hardware that perhaps we’re getting ready to

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Right.

Stuart Donnelson: Not only are we saving on a capex there, but we’re preventing that future outlay as well. So we’re getting a lot of benefit just by being able to reduce what those endpoints, ⁓ whether we need to get rid of the endpoints, whether or not we need to do something major to the backend ⁓ architecture. I think if we look at old world versus new world, what we got here, we’re badging into an OS, a VDI, ⁓ then going a browser ⁓ versus badging into a browser. So we’ve eliminated a lot of hardware and software costs right there. If we’re talking about login time, we’re drastically reducing the amount of login time it takes to get into an environment. If we’re talking about overhead, again, we’ve dropped a lot of what we have to have on the back end or a new expenditure on the front end what is essentially a lot less spend when we’re talking about just being able to get to a browser ⁓ And then, again, from that endpoint standpoint, we’re feeding into what we’ve been trying to say over last ⁓ years here with IGEL is that If we don’t have to upgrade that endpoint yet, why are we upgrading that endpoint? Why are we spending money on that? So there’s a lot of benefits here that aren’t directly related to Improvata or Chap and Go or otherwise, right? There are a of different things here we can do, get nail on.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Yeah, well certainly, with respect to where Idle comes in, ⁓ are, we could certainly repurpose and bring those ⁓ ⁓ further along in terms of the life cycle with putting our OS and repurposing them. ⁓ And we don’t require a lot of overhead on the device. ⁓ as the applications, ultimately, like Andy and I used talk about this a lot was the need to get to applications at the end of the day. Those applications have often been

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: served up from a Windows platform, but a lot of stuff going to a browser. And so you don’t necessarily need the Windows ecosystem unless there’s other tie-ins, but by and large, a lot of that is sort of legacy based apps that were built with the client server approach versus just a browser. And so there’s a ton of things happening right now where I can even, hey, I just need to get in and do some functional stuff from a local browser. And then of course, the…

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Net results of your infrastructure costs, right? You know, just yesterday I on a call with a customer and they’re looking to, you know, fine tune their budget. They’re polishing. They’re trying to trim where they can. And you know, the discussion was around, you know, endpoint strategy, right? Whether, you know, do you always need to deliver a virtualization down to that device if you only need to get to this out of the other? And so just helping them understand where that is, but also some of the other use cases and and with a combination of things, right? We’re really kind of like.

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: I will need you VDI for maybe a slither of this, but everything else I can maybe deliver just through a browser. But also one of the things you saw with respect to like Epic is when they delivered their hyperdrive ⁓ browser, what also came with it was they can extend that further away from the backend database and some latency perspective. And so it also said, well, I don’t necessarily need to deliver that from a VDI perspective. And so

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: ⁓ It’s now risen up this conversation around alternate browser options on a non-Windows endpoint. ⁓ of course, what functional things can I do in that, right? And so there’s probably a list of things that I can do from just a regular browser. And if I need the full functioning Windows version, I can go to a VDI delivered model as needed. have tie-ins to some of the third party ecosystem stuff, but.

Stuart Donnelson: Right.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: If I don’t need all that and I just need a local browser and I can also check my email, you know, and I don’t have to deliver it on VDI, then we’re delivering that with badge tap to browser here with this new seamless web SSO that we want jointly to work down with Improvata.

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm. Great, great. Is there anything that’s inherently different about the new offering that people would need to be aware of? ⁓ what I understand, it’s essentially the same with the exception of now we can do it in more ways. We can ⁓ offer that badge tab functionality inside of that web browser as opposed to needing ⁓ the on decline.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Yeah. Yeah, so in phase one what we’re doing is, hey, instead of ⁓ tap and launching a VDI session, ⁓ we still have that, of course. We’ll just badge tap and you can manually or auto launch a browser. In this case, ⁓ ones that we’ll start off with are Chromium and Edge. And very soon, right behind it is we’re finishing up some stuff with Island. And so that will all be ⁓ very so a lot of customers are looking at ⁓ Island, for example, as a means.

Stuart Donnelson: Hmm. Wonderful.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: and pros and cons around a secure browser. But so it’ll be a Chromium based solution and the components are basically involving some stuff that Improvata gave that we jointly incorporated and then they have a browser plugin. And then they’ve got some Web SSO functionality that will be tying into when you launch the the URL will go to their IDP and then, you know, so the user experience is basically gonna be tabbed.

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: you know their badge authenticate, launch the browser ⁓ redirects to Improvata IDP and then bam the user is logged in seamlessly and can do their thing. And we even showed it was really cool to show was Improvata was there demoing this ⁓ and get into this browser and then you go to sign an order ⁓ and the is allowed for various ways to sign like electronic substances. ⁓

Stuart Donnelson: Yep.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: more specifically controlled substances. so that’s things like a fingerprint or a token push or whatever, but they’ve also more recently allowed for facial recognition, which as you know, when you pull up your phone, you do face ID. So without coding around that, we actually were showing a very ⁓ early of like, I’m gonna go and log in and then I’m gonna launch and sign this order. And then a little browser window pops up using the local camera.

Stuart Donnelson: Great.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: put your face there and then you get a push to your phone or ⁓ your where you click it. And so just a complete seamless experience for the user all being done from a browser where typically that would have been delivered through a VDI session. So very exciting to be able to be part of something like that for the first time.

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm. Right. It just strikes me as funny because 10, 15 years ago, this was a lot of duct tape involved and did not work the same way. And I remember it just being one of those things where you keep getting little innovations like this. It may seem minor on the surface, but the amount of work that goes into making these systems all interconnect and work together, as most IT people know, is insane. But in this specific instance, I just remember it. how much work we had to go into to get this all to work properly.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Yeah, now believe me that, you know, it’s we’re definitely painting a nice picture here. But you know, there are some details we’re putting all that together. But you know, when it all comes together in the end, ⁓ it’s to have a really nice user experience and also tailing towards the modern delivery of where EHRs are going. And what’s really cool is, you know, except we’re seeing that trend all the across. ⁓

Stuart Donnelson: Right, exactly. Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: the spectrum from the meta text, the Cerner’s now Oracle and so forth. And I’ve talked to every single one of them and vast majority like, any ⁓ chromium browser can be used to authenticate and get into our web app. And then of course, ⁓ what’s cool is now seeing use cases where AI. So I just recently went to the doctor and the session I met, like maybe two months before that,

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: they didn’t record the conversation, but she walks to take in mind if I record it drops the phone. I said no problem. I know exactly what you’re doing here so. And so they’re also in in Verbatim shop and so I watched her badge in and I’m like sitting there going OK great. I want that to be an agile device. Of course in the end but ⁓ but be able to exactly so badge tap in alright. Here’s my chart and then let’s record a conversation and then AIs behind the scenes kind of ⁓ know doing and then goes right and so it’s a tremendous amount of time savings leveraging so much and be able to.

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm. I love it.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: be on the forefront of delivering real value to our customers is really a great thing to see.

Stuart Donnelson: It’s fun to see that. I’ve been in the doctor before having worked for a specific hospital system and helped design some of those systems. And I remember going in and hearing, you know, like they’ll sit down, like, I’m going do this, bad gins. Like, man, this used to be so much more difficult. And I’m like, I’m glad to hear you say that because I just helped build that, you know. So it is really cool to be part of this process. Health care is one of those things that I’ve always felt strongly about just because from an IP perspective, it makes you feel like you’re doing something good, right? You can see, you can see a real impact in this field. And that’s really cool. So. Really appreciate your time on that. I’m going leave you with one last question. And I’m not trying to put you on the spot here, but one of the things that I’ve observed and ⁓ of the reasons why I love with iJose so much ⁓ is see this expansion of what end user compute was to and what it’s now becoming. So ⁓ I know very the ⁓ idea of the browser, ⁓ we’ve been talking that pretty much the entire episode here. the idea of being able to do more through that web browser we ever have been able to do before. So, push on the spot. What’s one of your favorite things that you’ve seen out in the wild? Let’s the example I just gave with the badge tap. ⁓ What’s one the coolest examples you’ve seen in the last, ⁓ let’s say year of this type technology really becoming the pervasive way to deliver things? And I’ll give you a chance to go and I’ll give mine.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Yeah, so I think I mean it’s hard not to begin that answer without you know, some thing regarding AI right and and I think Fundamentally a lot of these AI toolings are based out of a browser. And so I Think ⁓ getting used it right it that’s a whole new Thing mean, it like every week there’s some changes there and so I think ⁓ if I was the last year what I’ve seen is, know, certainly some excitements around

Stuart Donnelson: Mm-hmm.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: incorporating AI and really understanding how to use it. I’m literally like right before we started this, was an image based on a discussion around a display board in healthcare, right? And so it literally finished right before we hit start on the recording. So ⁓ excited about seeing that, but it was just taking a little prom to say, I want to mix this. then, so it’s exciting to see that ⁓ how can help communicate and explain ideas. ⁓ And so ⁓ that me is probably the biggest thing right now.

Stuart Donnelson: Right? Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah. So the reason I brought this up and I was going to have this chat with you about a week ago, because I saw my father-in-law doing it, but he is very non-technical. He was an executive for a number of years for a pharmaceutical company and very big race fan. I don’t know how much you know about the Indy area, this is race, right? Yeah. Well, it was, it? I mean, that race was something else. Yeah. So everybody else.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: ⁓ that was a great race. Yeah, that last lap, holy moly.

Stuart Donnelson: 500 weekend was ⁓ this weekend. We had the race on Sunday It was a insane race right there ⁓ at the end, you know, like we got to see a photo finished closest one and 110 runnings I want to say ⁓ so So I’m watching my father on you and we always have a pool every year where we pick drivers and everything like that Well, we get all the results back and and I’m like, wait a minute, you know, like what is going on here? ⁓ He made ⁓ a interface Knowing nothing I hope this guy print

Chris Feeney – IGEL: a while.

Stuart Donnelson: He made a web interface for us to go in and grab our racers and submit how many tickets we were going to need and blah, blah, churn out a bunch of stuff. Next thing you know, I’m getting something back from that same interface with the scoring breakdown of all the points and how everything played out and everything like that. I’m just like, oh my goodness gracious, this has the ability to really change some things if I’m seeing my father-in-law do this right now. But I could tell if this was ChatTP degenerated. It was very obvious to any of us that have done this.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: It is pretty, yeah.

Stuart Donnelson: Day in and day out, right? Like we see all this stuff come. yeah, I I thought that was interesting that you brought up AI too, but I you’d appreciate the story here. You know, just seeing, ⁓ again, had your doctor walk in, you knew exactly what she was doing. I rely on AI transcription today. I don’t know what my brain would do without it. You know, like just the tool sets that we have in front of us that are just running through a web browser are just incredible. So to tie it back in, I think it’s really cool what you guys are doing with Improvata. ⁓ I’m excited ⁓ to see it. know that. I have a couple of customers that are trumping up the debt for it.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Yeah, that list is long for us to just some specifics. We wrap up. So for us, we plan to launch this with our IGEL Agent for Improvata, which is going to be version 1.6. As I mentioned earlier, initially it’ll be Chromium and Edge, and then right behind it, within a very short amount of time, is Island. And so maybe even before the end of June, hopefully, knock on wood. And also, there’s a new version of IGEL OS coming. But all this will be coming out in the next couple of weeks here.

Stuart Donnelson: That’s all tied together,

Chris Feeney – IGEL: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s been a long, mean, we started work on this probably in the October timeframe and initial discussions and then we began coding effectively at the beginning of January. And so it’s been exciting to kind of see the iterations of it and where we’ll go with it going forward. So appreciate your time and yeah.

Stuart Donnelson: You guys have knocking out of the park, so I’m excited to see it and appreciate you coming to join us and talk to us about it a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Everybody, thank you very much for joining us. Again, my name’s Stu Donaldson. I’m with Zintagra and I got my friend Chris Feeney here from iGel and we shall see you next week.

Chris Feeney – IGEL: All right, thanks. Appreciate it. Take care.