Bringing healthcare to the Berkshire community, while keeping sensitive data secure and avoiding mobile bill shock.
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (BHFT) is a community and mental health trust, providing a wide range of healthcare services to people of all ages living in Berkshire, Southeast England, and form part of the UK National Health Service (NHS).
Enabling staff with technology for better and safer patient care was the focus of BHFT when procuring mobile devices as part of their digital transformation.
Good data security, a must-have in public healthcare
Apple devices were chosen for being inherently more secure, however there were specific compliance aspects that also needed to be upheld. Any organization allowed to access patient data in the UK needs to achieve Cyber Essentials, and also comply with the the Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT), as set of guidelines for NHS Trusts designed to protect sensitive data. According to the guidelines on endpoint protection and content filtering, any device regardless of type must be blocked from accessing malicious websites or downloading apps not previously vetted and approved.
Another requirement to address was the significant data consumption across devices, and the high costs associated with mobile data usage. With over 5,000 devices enrolled, it was necessary to keep data usage steady and predictable.
To address these challenges, a comprehensive mobile security solution from Jamf was deployed, capable of managing and capping mobile data, give visibility across devices, iOS and applications, and block and remediate threats. This enabled users to access patient data remotely, in line with compliance regulations and other policies.
Moreover, the solution was able to half the data consumption on the managed devices, and provided the ability to budget mobile data requirements, ensuring individual users could not consume excessive amounts of data and eliminating the risk of roaming bill shock incidents.
Patient time is precious: enter Zero Trust Network Access
Next, the team turned their attention to making improvements to user experience when accessing a critical clinical application. Their current technology used authentication methods that were complicated and disconnected frequently, wasting valuable time and creating a bad experience for consultants during visits to their patients.
Adding Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to their stack was the next step for BHFT. The team integrated their existing identity provider to allow users to sign-in in line with network security policies. The enhanced Jamf solution was easy to configure and did not impact the user experience during deployment or after setup, as it sits on the background, requires no additional hardware and does not significantly increase network traffic.
Jamf solutions for healthcare organizations are powered with AWS to give patients, doctors and caregivers an always-on, flexible, scalable and secure experience.
Jamf was incredibly easy to use. We set the service up in a day and started rolling out to users the following week. The almost invisible experience to users means we get great end-user adoption too. It just works.
The comprehensive solution provided by Jamf, its capability for protecting sensitive data and making it accessible to the right users means that Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust continues to find more use cases for mobile devices, which is good news for staff as well as patients.