Identity Lifecycle Management For Hospitals
Tackling the persona problem
Customer Snapshot
This customer is a nationally ranked hospital, affiliated with a large university in a major US city. Although it operates as a division of the university (its several hundred physicians are university employees) and shares some facilities with the university, the hospital is an independent not-for-profit organization.
Challenges
Hospitals—particularly teaching hospitals—need to manage multiple HR sources (staff, doctors, and contractors across different medical facilities), individuals with multiple personas in affiliated organizations, and multiple identity lifecycles based on organizational relationship. In a teaching hospital, a physician might be a faculty member at the university while also being on the hospital’s payroll as a researcher. A staffer might be employed both at the customer’s hospital and at another facility. This customer had been using manual systems to manage these complex access and identity events. But this left the door open for error: sometimes access wasn’t expired correctly, different people were creating identities in different places, and the accounts didn’t always line up.
The customer reached out to Integral Partners after hiring a new associate director whose experience with identity management in healthcare environments made him realize there was work to be done. He wanted to help the hospital corral its disparate data, ensure HIPAA compliance, and automate inconsistent, error-prone manual processes. The organization was keen to implement a leading IAM solution to help; but first, it needed to figure out how to handle identities in its complicated organizational structure.
Solution
After investing deeply in research, design discussions, and scenario planning with the hospital’s leaders and staff, Integral Partners technologists developed a customized solution to the customer’s complicated organizational structure problem. They created an “attribute precedence engine,” which allows the hospital to accurately store and manage identity data with a single enterprise-level schema that connects to all the customer’s other applications. Thanks to the Integral Partner team’s extensive experience with identity challenges and deep architectural expertise, the customer was able to use the customized attribute engine to accelerate implementation of its IGA system.
Integral Partners also provided the customer’s in-house team with the knowledge, onboarding, demos, how-to guides, and other documentation to run and maintain the system. Deploying the training in parallel with the implementation — for example, by including the IT team in the IGA system testing — gave the customer crucial contextual experience and made user administration and operation training more effective.
Key Benefits
- Implementation of the selected IGA system within budget and software limitations
- A customized, effective solution for a complicated identity problem
- Replaced inconsistent and error-prone manual systems with an automated, accurate one
- Staff are trained and empowered to maintain the system