Availity Chooses ForgeRock To Help Manage, Route Millions Of Daily Transactions

Challenge

Availity previously used a legacy vendor’s solution for identity access management (IAM). However, the legacy technology lacked the ability to scale to the increasing number of healthcare practitioners and health plans using the system. It also lacked the flexibility to add new services as needed. In addition, legacy vendor options would take up-to-three times longer to deploy, come with a much higher price tag, and lack the strong customer support required to maintain a platform that handles millions of confidential health records.

Solution

Implement ForgeRock Identity Platform, which includes OpenDJ, OpenAM and OpenIDM

ForgeRock Benefits

• offers massive scalability and flexibility, which allows Availity to add millions of users and new services
• runs at a third of the computing power that was required by the company’s incumbent identity management vendor
• freed up three fulltime IT professionals from managing the legacy system; they are now building new revenue services
• deployed in less than six months
• supports two billion transactions annually
• provides user self-service, thus enabling registration, password reset and self-service access requests without the aid of the administrator and providing a more streamlined customer experience

Fast Deployment, High Performance and Super Scalability at One-Third the Compute Power

Availity’s largest business asset is its network, which connects hundreds of thousands of providers to health plans and enables them to process billions of transactions every year.

“ForgeRock’s Identity management really is at the center of our business and the center of our technology infrastructure,” said Jason Carmichael, manager of enterprise architecture for Availity. “Without identity management we’d have no way of securing, managing, and routing the millions of transactions occurring on our network every day. Since we’re in the healthcare market, it’s imperative that everything is secure and that we have a high level of confidence in identifying the individuals who are on our system and what they’re doing with it. Without an effective identity management strategy, our business would stop.”

During the evaluation process, Availity looked at a number of identity management vendors. The criteria evaluated included the vendor’s support model, whether the vendor was dedicated to the healthcare market, whether or not the vendor was planning to evolve its product, and the product’s ability to support an ever-increasing number of daily transactions while maintaining service level agreements (SLAs).

While legacy vendors tended to refer to their solutions as “robust,” Availity evaluators felt they all suffered from bloat, in that they shoehorned too many features into their products without fully integrating them; this, in turn, escalated support costs. In addition, Availity did not have confidence, based on their prior experience, that the legacy vendors would provide responsive support. For Availity, downtime of their identity management system means loss of customers and revenue. With open source and the highly responsive ForgeRock support team, Availity was confident that their business would be in good hands

“One of the things we love about working with ForgeRock is their transparency,” Jason continued. “With them, everything was out in the open, and they just made the whole process easier for us.”

During the vendor evaluation process, one of leading legacy identity management vendors Availity was considering suggested it would take approximately 18 months to roll out the proposed identity framework. Using ForgeRock’s Identity Management Platform, Availity was able to do a full deployment and become operational within six months. As of this writing, Availity is able to perform two billion transactions annually, and the deployment is running at a third of the computing power that was required by the company’s incumbent identity management vendor. What’s more, the ForgeRock Identity Platform requires less hands-on maintenance.

“We used to have three developers dedicated to our identity management platform just to make sure it stayed up and functioning,” said Jason. “Now that ForgeRock’s Identity Platform is in place and has consistently demonstrated its reliability and high performance, those three developers have been reassigned within the company to help us build out new services and offerings.”

The company is now working on implementing new services that will enable secure sharing of clinical information between providers and payers, which will ultimately improve the relationship between the people in the network and the patients whose information they are sharing and rely on to provide care.

“We’re really engineering a new authorization access management system that’s combining master data management with access management technology. Instead of policies driven by a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) query, policies will be driven by doing a lookup into our master data management system to see who knows who in the network. And based on that, we’ll determine whether or not it’s okay for that information to be shared. That’s what we’re working on now, which is an exciting opportunity,” Jason concluded.

About Availity

Founded in 2001, Availity has grown to become the largest real-time healthcare business information exchange in the country. A trusted intermediary between health plans and providers, Availity’s products ease the complexity of moving business and clinical information to healthcare stakeholders nationwide. Availity’s powerful, intelligent platform drives real-time connectivity with speed and accuracy at the intersection of healthcare and technology. With its origins in a collaborative effort between two of the country’s leading health plans, Availity has taken the insights of its founders, combined them with a spirit of innovation, and earned its place as a leader in the healthcare information business.

Availity’s products deliver revenue cycle and related business solutions for healthcare professionals who want to build healthy, thriving organizations. The solutions also include the tools, actionable insights, and expansive network reach that medical businesses need to get an edge.

Today, the Availity Health Information Network® extends to more than 575,000 active providers, 2,700 hospitals, 675 vendor partners and all health plans nationwide.