How Crucial is Identity Management in Healthcare

Digitalization is taking a wild ride like never before, giving many industry security threats as every bit of information is being stored in one or the other cloud-based ecosystem. And of course, the Healthcare industry is one of the vast sectors which requires proper channelization for smooth functioning and security concerns how the data is utilized, and it’s not new as well. Though the concern remains the same, will the new digital future promise opportunities for new value creation, improvised healthcare models, and silo barriers, along with complete data security. Here comes identity management in healthcare to satisfy the mentioned challenges and concerns.

What does this Identity Management imply?

Well, Identity Management and access control is the security discipline that provides individuals the right to access the resources to enterprise resources to keep systems and data secure. As we know, the healthcare industry is huge and stretches its wings in manifold direction, IAM addresses the critical urge for ensuring the appropriate access to resources across the ever-growing heterogeneous technology environments.

Why the Requirement of Patient Identity Management Matters With Soaring Digitalization?

Healthcare organizations must take responsibility for securing the confidential data of the patients available on the dark web. The protected health information (PHI) brings at ten times the price of financial data on the black market, making every healthcare organization, from private practitioners to national hospital networks, the target of criminals.

Thus, in the realm of healthcare data, the need for Patient Identity Management is getting crucial, with the increase in the quantity and linkage of electronic health care data. Lack of proper patient identity management can lead to complexity not only for healthcare providers but for everyone involved in healthcare, including hospital EHRs, patients, billing systems, pharmacy

record systems, medical devices, and insurance companies.

Security effort is counted as the foundation of any healthcare organization,i.e identity, and access management (IAM). As we know, IAM controls the authenticity of people from accessing PHI resulting in improved security, the decline in help desk calls, and assuring a better user experience when gaining access to critical information and services. No matter where a healthcare organization chooses to store its data, be it the cloud or on-premise, or in a hybrid environment, a proper IAM solution is responsible for keeping data seamless, secure, and scalable for a smooth operation in a connected world.

Current Security Challenges in the Healthcare Sector

1. Exchange of Health Information And Electronic Health Records

The healthcare data is making its fast migration into the digital realm, and encryption must be law of the land or it will lead to a data breach.

2. The Careless Adoption Of Cloud And Mobile Technology In Healthcare.

80% of healthcare data is assumed to “get through the cloud at some point in its lifetime” by 2020 (Source: InformationWeek). An increase in healthcare mobile apps is leaving patient data prone to the vulnerabilities of the cloud and individual mobile devices.

3. User Fault In Technology Adoption.

Data storage in unencrypted folders in the cloud, pave a simple pathway for a hacker to access your most personal data or credentials.

4. Hackers

The more digital access has given rise to hackers, in the realm of data theft no data is secure, as shown by the CHS Heartbleed attack.

Stats That Justifies the Robust Implementation of Identity Management in Healthcare

The 2020 Breach Barometer published by Protenus, states that more than 41 million patient records were breached in 2019.

Also, sources revealed that 59% of the respondents surveyed in Europe and the U.S. concerned about their medical data security, while 39% feared that hackers would play foul with their digital data.

Let’s Have Insight how Identity Management Solutions is benefiting Healthcare Sector:

1) Increase Productivity And lower IT Expense With Single Sign-On (SSO)

2)Strengthen Security And Control Vendor Access With Multi-Factor Authentication And Federated Identity.

3) Authenticate Users In On-Site or Remote Locations With Multi-Forest Active Directory

4)Take ownership And attain Visibility Into User Actions With Proper User Management And Customer Entitlements

5) Seamlessly manage Users Across Thousands Of Organisations with

Active Directory Federation Services.

6) Increase Organisational Agility And Scalability with LDAP Migrations.

Is Your Organisation Still Prioritizing Convenience Over Security?

With no surprise, then and now, security will be the top consideration across all digital activities. It is inevitable for healthcare organizations to establish security and convenience parallelly as both are imperative to choose. For any organization it is quite necessary to value their user’s data and at the same time establish complete convenience over the access.

For more information on the need for complete Identity management in healthcare and how it can benefit your organization, you can read

Conclusion:

Nowadays, companies are rapidly transforming and adding more cloud services to their environments which can complicate the overall process. And to overcome this critical situation adopting cloud-based Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS), and cloud Identity management in healthcare is an inevitable step. Hence, it is mandatory for an organization to choose a reliable partner, responsible for valuable and secured identity management solutions.