Savvy Support: Restricted IP Address

This morning, the Merus support team received a call from one of our users stating they couldn't log in. Normally, this type of phone call stems from the user forgetting his/her password. All passwords are not visible to us and are completely private so whenever this happens, we usually need to reset his/her password.

However, this morning's call was slightly different. This user was getting an "error" message on her login screen saying "Your Account is not Accessible from  your Current Location". She was quite confused since she had been using the same computer and the same login as before and had never come across this message.

The "error" message our caller was seeing.

To give a bit of background information on this "error" message, in User Management under Tools > Settings & Options, Firm Administrators have the ability to Restrict Access to MerusCase to only one or a few IP Addresses. This means that you can only allow a staff member of your firm to use Merus at the office and not at his/her home -- yet another way MerusCase gives you tools to ensure HIPAA compliance for your firm. If your staff member is unable to access MerusCase at home, then they are unable to view and transmit ePHI in an insecure and illegal setting.

With the support call this morning, it turns out that the user was unable to login because the firm's IP address is dynamic rather than static. Static IPs are assigned to one internet customer and never changes while Dynamic IP customers get assigned a different IP address sporadically. Having a Dynamic IP address as a Merus user means that if you restrict access to Merus for only one IP address, as a firm administrator, you will need to occasionally go into the staff member's account and update the IP address.

Since the user that phoned in was not a firm administrator, I let her know that the firm administrator must update the IP address and that, if necessary, the firm administrator could contact us and we could walk him/her through the steps in doing so. She immediately transferred me to a firm administrator and with the handy Google search "What is my IP" conducted by the firm administrator, they were able to update the initial caller's account making it possible for that user to successfully login.

Understanding and finding reasonable and quick solutions to issues our users come across is the Support Team's goal. We want our users to be happy. It seems with this client, we were successful.