If the past few months have taught us anything, it’s that healthcare organizations need to be able to scale – quickly, securely, and with patient care at the forefront.
The key is operational agility.
Operational agility is the ability to respond quickly to changing external conditions, without compromising long-term objectives. In a healthcare context, this means being able to respond to rapid swings in public health conditions, new regulatory guidance, or emerging security threats without compromising on patient care, data protection, or research goals.
Fundamentally, developing operational agility is about building a core set of processes and capabilities and enabling your people to operate dynamically within that environment.
Non-Employees are an Operational Blind Spot
In recent months, we’ve spoken with many IT leaders who have struggled with one of the biggest challenges in operating an agile healthcare organization: onboarding and offboarding non-employee users.
These IT leaders have robust and long-established systems and processes in place to manage their internal workforce users but little in the way of centralized management of everyone else, like affiliated entities, most doctors and nurses, referring physicians, volunteers, residents, and researchers.
Why is this important?
For one, during a public health crisis or any other dynamic external event, these non-employees play a critical role in ensuring you maintain high-quality patient care and service. Quickly onboarding and offboarding these resources allows you to surge resource levels with demand, providing your front-line, full-time workers with the additional support they need to care for patients.
But these non-employees also play an important role in safeguarding patient PII and PHI. Often, non-employees need access to sensitive systems and large amounts of sensitive data. In some cases, they have greater levels of privilege even than employees. While this access is often legitimate and needed for patient care, poor visibility into this access introduces tremendous risk into your organization. If you don’t have the necessary processes in place to automate onboarding and offboarding processes, manage the non-employee lifecycle, and ensure that risk ratings and credentials are in order, you are putting patient data and sensitive systems at risk.
Adopting a Risk Aware Posture for Non-Employees
Non-employee users must be handled through a centralized, risk-aware process. All non-employee users with access to sensitive systems and patient data require the same (if not more) scrutiny than traditionally managed employees.
Many organizations have tried to improve management of these users by using existing IAM and HR technologies – but these tools are not designed for collaborative data collection from sources both inside and outside of your organization (as is typical with third parties), and they aren’t able to assess the risk associated with the users.
The good news is that there are simple, straightforward improvements you can make to optimize this process.
In the video below, identity and security experts from Focal Point and SecZetta walk through several common use cases, sharing how improved technology and business processes can enable fast, secure onboarding, offboarding, and management of non-employee identities for healthcare providers.
This new approach for healthcare organizations enables:
- Centralized visibility into non-employee populations and their risk levels.
- Streamlined onboarding by automating tasks like data collection, approvals, and more.
- Integrated processes that pass data to your IAM, IGA, and PAM systems for proper access management.
- More secure handling of PII, PHI, and sensitive systems and applications.
And best yet, implementation of a new third-party identity lifecycle management program is straightforward, cost-effective, and in many cases, can be done within a matter of days.
Onboarding New Third-Party Healthcare Resources in Days
The short demo below demonstrates how healthcare organizations can harness the benefits of a modern non-employee management program. If you’d prefer a personal demo, or have questions about Focal Point and SecZetta’s cost-effective quick start program, please contact us today.
Want more identity insights in your inbox?
Subscribe to Focal Point's Risk Rundown below - a once-a-month newsletter with templates, webinars, interesting white papers, and news you may have missed. Thousands of your colleagues and competitors have signed up! You can unsubscribe at any time.
