Ezproxy, from http://www.usefulutilities.com is not a proxy server. It does not require a server. For a hospital you could run it on an old pc. Ezproxy rewrites url’s on request. IT people think that all of the user’s home internet traffic is now going to be going through their network and cringe. You need to explain to them that ezproxy rewrites the URL’s only on web pages for specific domains that you add to the configuration, and only for people that are authenticating against the ldap, or active directory or email system that they are already providing. It is a cheap and effective way to make the doctors and managers very happy.

We utilize VPN downloads for our offsite users, but it is a difficult one-time set-up…..

We have been able to work with some of our vendors to “set-up” off-site access, meaning once our users “log-into” our Portal and then they are authenticated into some of our resources, Ovid, StatRef, NEJM to name a few, and although this is successful it does not work for proxying every single journal title…..

I am interested in hearing more about how CGH set up its terminal services for the EMR portal… I think this is something we should be offering but are not it.

I’d be interested to know the rationale of your I.T. department in allowing clinicians VPN access, but not allowing them to access pre-approved clinical (extranet) sites from inside your hospital’s network. Offhand, I can’t think of a reason why the expense of Athens should be neccessary in the context that you have described.

-David

That is why we (the library) are seriously looking into Athens to provide off campus access to our resources to our doctors. For an extremely reasonable fee (1000 users=$1500, 1001-2000 users=$2750, 2001-5000=users $4000) will make it so all of my users have access to my electronic resources off campus. Additionally, each users only has to remember their own username and password. They don’t have to remember 1 for Ovid, another for StatRef, another for MDConsult, and so on. Their one username and password activates access to everything. The nice thing is that you can set user permissions as well. For example, You have medical students who leave in one year, you can set it so their account expires in one year. You have nursing students who have certain databases licensed only to them and not the rest of the hospital, you can set it so that only your nursing students can get access to those databases.

I do not own stock in Athens (wish I did), I do not work for them and I have no financial interest in them. I just set up a trial to their program and I will let you know how that works. Sorry this is long, but I thought I would offer them up as another method for providing access to off campus resources.

Actually, the first two options above fixed exactly that problem for us. As long as traffic was going from the hospital’s proxy to UpToDate, the access isn’t “remote,” but clinicians are able to access it from off-site.

Best,

-David