Ordr Clinical Defender: A focused HTM product for the modern healthcare environment

As healthcare organizations turn more and more to technology as a way to provide a higher quality of healthcare to their patients, and support skilled staff with a means of improving health outcomes for more people, healthcare technology management (HTM) professionals are finding themselves with a greater responsibility to more efficiently manage and mitigate risks from the healthcare IT estate. That is a huge task for smaller organizations, which means the tools they rely on have to be easy to deploy and use, specialized for defense of the healthcare threat landscape, and capable of reducing the burden of time-intensive tasks through automation.

Announcing Ordr Clinical Defender

That is why we just announced Ordr Clinical Defender, a tool to streamline the management of connected medical devices. Based on our advanced asset and risk management platform, and developed in cooperation with HTM professionals from some of the world’s best healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs), Ordr Clinical Defender will serve as a force multiplier for HTM teams, enabling them to more efficiently, accurately and automatically manage and protect their connected medical devices by:

• Automating real-time asset inventory;
• Addressing compliance by identifying missing, newly-connected, or misplaced devices;
• Mitigating risks by identifying devices with vulnerabilities and recalls;
• Leveraging device utilization insights to support maintenance and procurement decisions; and,
• Accelerating remediation efforts for devices with clinical risks.

The combination of these capabilities means that healthcare organizations can reduce clinical risks by prioritizing remediation of high-risk devices. Organizations can also save millions of dollars by having a real-time inventory of devices, being able to locate missing devices, and optimizing device utilization. Those savings come by reducing the amount of time HTM personnel spend simply looking for misplaced equipment—as much as one hour per shift. Device utilization insights with Ordr Clinical Defender also mean more efficient utilization of medical equipment, and more efficient spending on the procurement of new equipment.

Saving Time and Money

Research has found that there is a discrepancy of between 15-20% between assets registered in an organization’s computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) and devices actually deployed on an organization’s network. That results in inefficient decision making that can impact patient care, and it can also result in the unnecessary purchase of expensive new equipment simply because existing assets are not accounted for by HTM teams.

This lack of visibility increases an organization’s risk and compliance profile because devices operating beyond the visibility of HTM and IT personnel are unprotected and vulnerable to attack. And if a device known to contain a patient’s protected health information (PHI) goes missing, that could constitute a costly data breach. According to the most recent Ponemon-IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, healthcare organizations incurred an average $9.23 million loss per incident. That figure is by-far the highest of any industry, and more than twice the overall average of $4.24 million.

Developed with HTM Experts, for HTM Professionals

Ordr Clinical Defender was developed with a number of capabilities designed to support the needs of healthcare organizations. Some of these include device-specific reporting and analytics, real-time asset discovery and inventory, automated CMMS data updating, identification of vulnerable clinical equipment, device usage reporting and analytics, guest network monitoring, and management features that facilitate patching, maintenance, and alerts whenever medical devices with PHI have not been seen on the network for more than 60 days.

Ordr Clinical Defender is the product of a collaborative partnership with some of the world’s leading healthcare organizations to develop and deliver a simplified product optimized for the needs of HTM professionals. And because it was developed in cooperation with HTM experts, it has everything HTM and clinical engineering teams need, and no unnecessary extras that might complicate operations. Ordr Clinical Defender means HTM teams have the power of efficient, accurate, and automated medical device management at their fingertips.

Pandian Gnanaprakasam

Pandian has more than 20 years of product and engineering leadership experience and is also a serial entrepreneur. Before founding Ordr, he was the Chief Development Officer at Aruba, responsible for all of engineering and product management functions. Aruba, an enterprise mobile wireless company, was acquired by HPE for $3 Billion in March 2015. Before Aruba, Pandian served as the head of engineering for Cisco’s multi-billion-dollar Wi-Fi business unit and before that as VP of engineering for low-end switching product lines. He graduated with a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Chennai, India and holds several patents to his credit in various networking technologies.