On-demand Identity Management
In a world where information and applications are "virtually" everywhere, healthcare organizations are spending more time and resources trying to find, access, and share critical patient information instead of doing what they do best: delivering care. Healthcare organizations are confronted with the requirements of providing access to critical patient information across the organization: but, how do medical organizations secure and provide access to this information without becoming a technology company? Answer: Covisint.
How many IDs and passwords do you have?
Clinicians and staff typically have between three to seven user IDs and passwords to access disparate sources of information in a medical setting. As employees and patients, we log into multiple systems every days - sometimes as often as 70 times per day - to view information, download reports, or access critical applications, such as eLabs or ePrescribe.
According to Gartner research, costs associated with supporting IDs and passwords average $100 per year, per user, per ID. Given a healthcare organization with 500 employees, each with three to seven IDs, this would amount to $150,000 - $300,000 in basic security administration costs per year.
The security challenges associated with this "new world of services and information everywhere" reach well beyond the cost of identity and access management. They include:
- "authentication overload" - too many login locations with different IDs/passwords
- inefficiencies and inconsistencies associated with administrative processes (e.g., access registration and request)
- administrative burdens associated with a more mobile workforce - seasonal and temporary staff rotating jobs more frequently
- greater security risk due to centralized and inconsistent policies
- HIPAA and standards compliance
Healthcare organizations need an on-demand services-based approach to managing identities
For healthcare organizations, security is a necessity, not a core competency. Identity management can divert your attention, time, and resources away from you core business. Identity management for healthcare organizations is also complex and costly.
Covisint provides an on-demand solution for healthcare that minimizes taxing your healthcare organization's resources and time. As a hosted security service, this offering centralizes and automates the process of exposing, accepting, and monitoring digital identities across security domains. Covisint helps healthcare organizations leverage state-of-the-art identity management services while insulating them from the cost and complexity of a "do-it-yourself" approach.
Covisint significantly reduces cost while enhancing your ability to collaborate with internal and external partners. By making identities "portable," Covisint enables user to log in once (through single sign-on) to gain access to all of the resources to accomplish the job - no matter where those applications, data, and information reside.
Leveraging Covisint's on-demand security services, healthcare organizations have realized the benefits of:
- Reduced cost and complexity - reduce administrative (help desk, password reset, directory support, new hires or terminations) and systems costs (duplicate technology solutions) while gaining increased care quality using a consistent and comprehensive set of web-based security tools.
- Improving the end-user experience - with single sign-on (SSO) and federated access, employees and subscribe to and access information and applications with ease.
- “3 R's” of identity management - errors, omissions, and redundancies in identity data are reduced across systems, ensuring that the right people have the right information at the right time.
- Improved policy enforcement - using a centralized authorization framework across multiple applications, healthcare organizations can minimize security risk (e.g., domain and orphaned accounts), support access to sensitive resources and respond to heightened government oversight and regulatory requirements (e.g., HIPAA, SOX).
- Fast, flexible provisioning - providing configurable workflow to meet your organizations' needs, Covisint delivers user self-regulation and password resets, delegated administration, full audit and logging, and a rules-based approach to automated granting of access.
- Federated single sign-on - Users authenticate at Covisint and seamlessly access multiple connected domains using standard federation protocols (e.g., SAML). As an alternative to authenticating at Covisint, users can authenticate at their "home domain" using their existing workplace user IDs and passwords. Covisint then allows those users to seamlessly travel from local domains to trusted partners without re-authenticating.
Covisint provides identity management at a fraction of the cost
Covisint provides state-of-the-art identity management at a fraction of the "do-it-yourself" costs. Today, Covisint supports more than two million federations per month for more than 45,000 companies worldwide. Covisint's identity management solution has received critical acclaim by technology analysts. According The Burton Group, "The identity management market continues to enjoy phenomenal growth, but until now, the industry has not produced a viable option for hosted identity services. Covisint offers enterprise customers an important architectural option for outsourcing account management for external users."
