Continuum Health Partners Turns to Novell for a Stable, Secure Open Enterprise

Novell helps the hospital system generate significant savings and improves secure access to patient information

SALT LAKE CITY (BrainShare® 2006)—21 Mar 2006— Continuum Health Partners, a 3,000-bed non-profit hospital system, chose Novell to secure, update and fully manage critical elements of its technology infrastructure. Novell will also implement a security and identity solution to give the clinical staff fast, secure access to patient information in order to continually improve patient care. As a result of working with Novell, Continuum is improving security and access to critical applications, establishing a stable, efficient infrastructure and avoiding the $8 million cost of moving to a Microsoft* environment by managing its Novell infrastructure more effectively.

“In three months, Novell stabilized our entire e-mail system and put us on a path to managing all our desktops,” said Ken Lobenstein, CTO of Continuum Services. “To us, that felt like overnight. We’ve made more progress in the last few months than we had in the previous two years.”

Novell IT Services maintains all Novell® GroupWise® e-mail, authentication, file and print services for Continuum as well as the Novell ZENworks® infrastructure used to manage and patch more than 8,000 Microsoft Windows* desktops. The Continuum environment is monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year from Novell’s global network operations center.

Novell Consulting® is also helping Continuum build a robust security and identity solution with Novell eDirectoryTM and Novell Identity Manager. The IT staff will be able to automatically issue each user a single ID and password which will increase security and improve access as users will no longer need to remember five to 10 passwords. This approach will provide tighter controls and track who accesses patient information and when for compliance purposes. The staff will also be able to further safeguard patient data by immediately revoking access for employees who leave the organization.

“Without the ability to quickly provision and de-provision users, we could face serious HIPAA compliance issues,” Lobenstein said. “Before implementing security and identity solutions from Novell, there was no way for our IT staff to manually keep user information up to date in every system. Now it will be automatic and we’ll be free from routine administration.”

Continuum has long-term plans to integrate user identity information across 300-400 applications. Novell Identity Manager will automatically synchronize information across the enterprise, eliminating manual updating and maintaining an accurate source of user information. Self-service capabilities such as password reset will help ease help desk costs as well.

Michael Lyons, vice president of Novell Technical ServicesSM, said, “When facing tight budgets and working with lean staffs, organizations like Continuum find that using Novell IT Services can free up the internal staff to focus on strategic technology issues, rather than day-to-day network administration. At the same time, we are helping Continuum take an important next step in security and identity that will give doctors and nurses access to critical applications in a matter of seconds, and help the hospital meet stringent HIPAA requirements.”

About Novell
Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) delivers Software for the Open Enterprise™. With more than 50,000 customers in 43 countries, Novell helps customers manage, simplify, secure and integrate their technology environments by leveraging best-of-breed, open standards-based software. With over 20 years of experience, more than 5,000 employees, 5,000 partners and support centers around the world, Novell helps customers gain control over their IT operating environment while reducing cost. More information about Novell can be found at http://www.novell.com.

Novell, GroupWise and ZENworks are registered trademarks, Novell Consulting is a registered service mark, eDirectory and Software for the Open Enterprise are trademarks, and Novell Technical Services is a service mark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. *All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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