The NHS National Library for Health (NLH) is deploying
an identity management system to enable 257,000 NHS staff to
securely access its resources.
It has signed a five-year deal with Eduserv, the not-for-profit
IT services group, to supply the single sign-on Athens system.
With the system, NHS staff and placement students in England
will be able to access full-text journals, key clinical databases
and e-books on the NLH
portal, as well as benefit from free publishing in open-access
journals.
These resources are critical in helping doctors, nurses,
students, health managers and other members of the NHS to keep
informed, said the NLH.
The NLH portal uses Athens to identify users' organisational
affiliations, enabling searches across all of the resources that
they are entitled to access.
Athens also allows the portal to save the searches and settings
of individual users, so every time a user logs on to the portal
with their Athens username and password, the portal customises
itself according to their preferences.
This helps NHS staff to find the information they need as
quickly as possible.
Ian McKinnell, technical manager at the National Library for
Health, said, "To enable the better use of evidence and enable
improvements in safer health care, it is vital that NHS managers
and clinicians have ready and reliable access to knowledge.
Establishing a knowledge sign-on is a vital foundation to this
objective."