Acceptable Usage Policies get Prescribed at Mater Private Hospital

Dublin June 2nd 2005, The Mater Private Hospital is one of Ireland's leading private hospitals - a centre of medical excellence offering the very highest standard of acute medical treatment.

Since it’s opening in 1986, the Mater Private Hospital has pioneered major developments in Irish medicine particularly in the area of technological innovation. The hospital employees 700 medical and support staff with over 140 specialist consultants and a turnover in excess of €100M.

A strategic priority for the Mater Private Hospital was the improvement of their methods of implementing unambiguous network usage standards on its 250 computer user-based employees. The hospital realised that they were facing demands for compliance – from security, risk management and internal audits. The need to adequately inform the employees caused the hospital to review both the Acceptable Usage Policy and the means of delivering it. The traditional methods of communicating policies were not effective due to administration distribution and a cumbersome signature based approach. Speaking about the problems they were experiencing, Michael Power, IT Manager of the Mater Private Hospital said, “Our methods of communicating to our staff were through email and departmental presentations followed by manual Acceptable Usage Policy acceptance signatures however, these were proving to be time-consuming and ineffective as employees rapidly forgot the content of the AUP. There is little point in having an Acceptable Usage Policy unless it is constantly before the users and continuously requiring acknowledgement. The importance of security and compliance has become too great to rely on signatures people had made years earlier.”

Baronscourt Technology® was able to provide a clever and effective solution to the Mater Private Hospital’s problem. Running over all major computer networks and operating systems, MetaCompliance is a software solution that directly deals with the issues surrounding the communication, deployment and affirmation of company policies and information to the employee. It allows the organization to communicate its messages to one individual, groups of employees or all members of staff. It therefore works within diverse organisations to communicate with various departments, locations and job titles. It provides the logging & reporting capability to provide documented backup in the event of litigation. MetaCompliance enabled the Mater Hospital to successfully communicate their most important policy to date – their Acceptable Usage Policy.

When asked how the solution fitted in with their organisation Michael Power replied, “In conjunction with our internet filtering software and email filtering software, MetaCompliance completed the last third of the pie. Baronscourt Technology delivered the project within the specified time deadline and within budget. We are extremely happy with the service we received from Baronscourt and the performance of MetaCompliance. The solution is simple to use and has given a currency to the Acceptable Usage Policy that did not previously exist, while eliminating the manual effort required up to now.”

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

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Accountancy Ireland Extract: Acceptable Usage Policies at the Mater Private Hospital