Connecting Clinical Trialists

Identifying and reaching a larger, more diverse group of clinical trialists across Pitt and UPMC is one of many important goals for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). Pitt IT assisted with this objective by importing and providing access to data from ClincalTrials.gov, a web-based resource that contains information about medical studies in human volunteers. Pitt IT is also developing a tool to help the community of clinical trialists across the institution connect with each other and support training, collaboration, and mentorship.

Ensuring Secure Access to Patient Data

Student workers in the Clinical and Translational Science Institute need to be able to securely access patient data from any device. We are working with CTSI to rapidly deploy a secure virtual desktop environment that will allow student workers to do just that.

Fostering Health and Wellness

Pitt IT completed system updates for Pitt Pharmacy that enables the clinic to perform wellness checks for students, faculty, and staff. These include BMI, blood glucose, and blood pressure screenings to support the health and well-being of the University community.

Managing Psychiatry’s Servers

The Department of Psychiatry’s research computing infrastructure had been hosted at the Department of Medicine. The group reached out to Pitt IT seeking a higher level of personalized IT support. After working to better understand their lab infrastructure and HIPAA security needs, Pitt IT will provide and manage six virtual servers with appropriate security protocols. This will provide Psychiatry research units access to continuous monitoring, proactive maintenance, and immediate attention to issues or problems.

Rethinking Server Hosting

The School of Dental Medicine and School of Medicine needed new servers to support new and upgraded software necessary for their operations. Rather than having each school buy, set up, and maintain on-site hardware, Pitt IT provisioned seven virtual servers to run critical business and clinical applications. Pitt IT will host, back up, and monitor the virtual servers, as well as provide underlying infrastructure management and maintenance. This solution frees school support staff to allocate their time to other mission-critical needs.

Securing Workstations

The Graduate School of Public Health was interested in providing better control over access to their restricted systems. Pitt IT assisted in updating their network firewall protection and applying Virtual Private Network (VPN) clients to their workstations. These changes improve overall security and enhance access control by dividing workstations into isolated segments on the network.

Standardizing Department Devices

The more time departmental IT staff must devote to routine device management, the less time they have to focus on strategic initiatives. Pitt IT’s Enterprise Device Management (EDM) program solves this problem by standardizing a department’s machine settings, software installation, security updates, and more. It enhances security, simplifies support, and empowers departmental IT staff to focus on high-value priorities. Pitt IT is working with Health Sciences to implement the EDM program across the Department of Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine, Department of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, School of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences, and School of Nursing.

Supporting Vaccination Efforts

The Health Sciences Vaccination & Health Connection Hub relies on Pitt IT to provide technology to support their efforts to avoid infectious illness outbreaks, thereby ensuring uninterrupted academic, research, athletic, social, and administrative activity on campus. Pitt IT augmented the system used for the administration of Flu and COVID vaccines to include Monkeypox, as well as associated questionnaires and a general vaccination consent. Pitt IT also added pediatric bivalent COVID boosters to the Hub’s vaccine scheduler, allowing the University to become one of the first providers of these boosters in the area. Future plans include enhancements enabling people to register for tetanus, shingles, and pneumonia vaccines.