Help connecting to the doctors patient information portal with your Macintosh
The following is how I was able to connect my wifes Macintosh to the patient information system called "Remote One" at memorial hospital
in Savannah Georgia. They do not offer any specific Macintosh support even though connecting from your Mac is both
possible and pretty easy. These instructions worked for us, but they are not endorsed, tested or supported by
Memorial hospitals IT department. Feel free to bug them about Mac support anyway as they really should make it
official since it's such a no brainer. Please do email me with questions or comments, however if the info is not in this article
I probably don't know anything more. If you have something to add please let me know!
Thank you!
HISTORY: until recently Macs have had no problem connecting to the Memorial Health patient information system,
Remote One. Not long ago their security certificate expired or they decided to get a new one or something that necessitated everyone
to reset the information on their local computers. The IT department was able to post detailed instructions for Windows machines
but was not able to do so for their Mac users. Of which it turns out there are plenty of as I keep hearing from them :)
WHAT YOU NEED:
- Mac OSX There are citrix clients for earlier Mac software versions, but I have only tried this on OSX 10.4. I
believe that it will work just fine on earlier OSX probably from 10.2 or later.
- Internet Explorer for the Mac download from microsoft HERE
There is a bug on the server side of Remote One that keeps it from working with Safari. For some reason it thinks that
Safari is a Windows program and so presents the windows program in a browser window which will not run on the mac. If you connect
with internet explorer the server knows you're running on a Mac and gives you the correct way to connect.
- Macos Citrix client Download and install the latest free citrix client from their homepage at the
Citrix Systems Download Page
Installing the program is pretty painless. it will end up in your Applications folder
- New security certificate You will need to download the new certificate from Memorials website.
I no longer can find the direct link to this file, but according to the Windows instructions you will find the
link by going to http://www.memorialhealth.com/ then clicking on the
"Team Members" link and finally the "Remote One" link. (ignore any security errors you get at this point and just continue)
after logging in you will get to the citrix login page which will have a link on it called "Click here for updated Versign
Certificate" clicking that link will download a file called "CA Verisign.cer" to your desktop.
UPDATE: it would appear that this file is no longer linked to from that section of the website.
You may have to contact support directly to get a copy of it. I am not posting a link to download it directly
from my site here, but I would be happy to forward a copy to anyone that woudl like to contact me personally via
email.
- Install Certificate: once the file is downloaded double click it in the finder. It will open the system
keychain program and ask you if you want to add it. Go ahead and add it to this to suppress errors from the web browser later.
(this step is not stricly necessary)
- Install Certificate into Citrix Unfortunately citrix doesn't look at the system keychain you just added the certificate to
so you have to do it separately. If you installed the citrix client above into the default location you'll find the folder in your
Applications folder, it's called "Citrix ICA Client". Open that folder and you'll find the Citrix application as well as a folder called
"keystore" open the keystore folder. Inside that you'll find another folder called "cacerts" open that folder as well and copy that
"CA Versign.cer" file that you downloaded above into this folder.
- You're now done and ready to connect!
How to connect:
- Startup Internet explorer and visit http://www.memorialhealth.com/remoteone.aspx
- login and click on the correct icon for the patient information system. Instead of opening up in a browser window as it does
on a Windows machine it will download a small file to your desktop probably called "launch.asp". If Citrix installed correctly
that file will open with it automatically if just double clicked. The citrix client will launch and you'll be connected and the
interface you're familiar with will load up on your screen.
Problems?
- The only issue is that you can't use Safari, and that Internet Explorer is not smart enough to look into the system keychain for
the certificate you installed so you will have to endure the 3 or 4 popups that Internet Explorer gives you about not trusting the
certificate. I can't figure out how to install the certificate directly into IE on the Mac. If you know how to do this please drop me
a note and I'll add that info to the page.
this also works at St Joes hospital in town! they use the same citrix interface and their system actually works with Safari and
so you don't have to use Internet Explorer for that one.
Many hospitals and business probably have similar problems with certificates. Luckily once you know how to install the certificate into Citrix on the Mac
getting citrix to work is easy! so this page may be of help to people in other places as well. Good Luck.
If you see Dr. Sentman around the hospital, be sure to say hi from her husband!