Regional Samaritan Hospital; Kearney NE. After a long meeting of the IT department at RSH, Jay Koh, VP of Information Technology announced that new and creative ways of locking practitioners out of their EMR accounts are coming soon.
Elaborated, Jay Koh: “Our present schemes are clever, cruel and inflict meaningful annoyance to all EMR users. I mean locking you out after three unsuccessful attempts or forcing you to change passwords every week is solid. Requiring passwords with 12 unique characters, none of which is a vowel was brilliant. And the guy who decided to make you to use a different password for each of the 5 different applications got a raise. Did I mentioned that they all reset at different times? No, you may not use the same password from 10 years ago!”
However, continued Jay Koh, “We can do more. We can create more frustration. We can drive you into pure agony and torment as you get locked out at the start of your shift. We can make you utter expletives you didn’t even know existed while you’re on hold trying to reset you password. We can make you question the decency of the human institutions as you lose access during a code. Yes we can!”
While the full plan is still congealing, the IT people hinted at such intriguing ideas as permanently fixing keyboards in caps, requiring passwords to contain 85 characters, locking out after a single unsuccessful attempt or just using the middle finger emoji instead of a lock out message. Speculations floated that IT could get even more creative by moving the IT help desk to a country where no English is spoken. By the way, if you think that IT people sometimes change your password just to mess with you, you’re NOT incorrect.
At the time of the announcement ANA estimates that 15-20% of a nurse’s time is spent on logging in and resetting and updating passwords.
