Identity Management: Connecting The Digital Age Of Healthcare
By Jessica Morrison, Senior Director, Global Product Marketing at ForgeRock
Aging populations, the proliferation of chronic diseases, rising costs, and the expectation of affordable, effective care are serious challenges for healthcare organizations. Working to stay competitive and improve quality of care, healthcare providers are transforming into digital businesses, using technology to access, share, and analyze patient information in order to efficiently deliver healthcare and attack these challenges head-on.
One of the most important steps for healthcare providers heading into digital transformation is to build new digital identity ecosystems across users, connected things, and cloud services. Ensuring the protection of patient privacy remains a priority for digital initiatives, as organizations must uphold compliance with data-sharing laws like HIPAA and the EU General Data Protection Regulation. Secure, unified digital ecosystems are a critical step toward improving access to quality, affordable healthcare.
Privacy In The Hands Of The Patient
Digital transformation in healthcare is being shaped by a handful of factors. Users — from patients to providers — are on the rise, and more connected devices and services are going online than ever. Healthcare organizations are playing catch up to this growth, racing to ensure and protect privacy for each user and service. The data they are tasked with protecting is highly valuable, not only to their organization, but to the users it is attached to as well. Data confidentiality is also critical for healthcare organizations. Keeping personal data secure is not just about regulatory compliance; it is also about building trust and protecting patient relationships. Organizations must ensure the identities of users, connected things, and cloud services are verified and authorized to guard patient privacy at all levels. Providers not only have to secure sensitive health data, but also share it with relevant people, organizations, and devices that need it to provide optimal care.
It’s time to give users the keys to the kingdom. Healthcare providers can give patients control over their health data with User-Managed Access (UMA) — an emerging OAuth-based protocol designed to give individuals a unified control point for authorizing who and what can get access to their online personal data, content, and services, no matter where all those things live on the web. In interactions with healthcare organizations that have adopted UMA, patients can determine who gets access to their data, for how long, and under what conditions. Patients can authorize data sharing with the appropriate doctors and care providers to enable greater collaboration between healthcare stakeholders, and easily revoke access when it is no longer required. The kind of digital transformation achievable through technologies such as UMA shows that healthcare organizations have untapped opportunities to develop new, innovative systems that increase healthcare efficiency and effectiveness.
Connected Devices Need Security
Legacy identity systems cannot seamlessly connect users, devices, and cloud services. Originally designed for internal deployments — namely, managing employee identities and access to data assets within an organization — they’re just not built for the type of scale needed for external identity management where large numbers of customers or patients come into play. As a result, healthcare organizations relying on legacy identity systems have had difficulty building meaningful digital relationships with their patients, and many fail to deliver personalized health services.
Today’s highly scalable digital identity platforms — often known as customer identity systems — empower healthcare organizations to create seamless user experiences across channels by tying users, connected things, and cloud services to digital identities, all within a digital identity ecosystem. Within this ecosystem, customer identity platforms can be used to register users (patients and individual healthcare providers), services, and connected things (medical equipment and devices), link them together, authorize and de-authorize their access to data, and apply policies that dictate security practices and personalization. This interconnected approach unifies patient identity and gives healthcare organizations a better understanding of patient needs by looking at the big picture. Just as retail organizations talk about developing a unified view of their customers and delivering omnichannel experiences, so can healthcare organizations use identity to get greater insight into patient conditions and tailor care appropriately. Indeed, healthcare providers can modernize their services by building digital identity ecosystems that support user-friendly new technologies that come with the internet of things.
Contextual, Continuous Security
It is no longer sufficient to simply authenticate and authorize users. Systems must perpetually monitor activity to detect suspicious behavior and unusual circumstances that could reveal a malicious actor. The authenticity of digital relationships must be constantly verified and organizations must be able to impose step-up authentication and revoke access if necessary. Does the patient, doctor, nurse, or device usually log in from Germany? Do they usually log in from a desktop computer? What time does the log in usually occur? There are additional ways to authenticate the legitimacy of the user’s identity and their access rights, whether with text codes, emails, security questions, or biometrics. If behavior is suspicious, patient data can be secured.
Seamless, Personalized Customer Experience
Numerous healthcare providers struggle with fragmented patient profiles that can lead to inefficient care and human error as the information must be manually aggregated. There is no single view of the patient due to the siloed nature of healthcare data. Unified customer profiles, on the other hand, improve efficiency and enable collaboration across healthcare organizations.
Next generation identity management solutions can consolidate the identity data of users, connected things, and cloud services, so every department and every employee can respond to patients with the knowledge of who they are and what their needs are. It is relationship-based identity management that creates personalized and meaningful interactions between healthcare providers and their patients. The easier it is to link identities and share data between stakeholders like doctor and patient, the greater the advantage for the organization. Healthcare organizations in the U.S. must embrace the shift to digital business in order to remain competitive and effective in the modern world. A scalable, flexible, and secure digital identity ecosystem is necessary to protect sensitive health data and deliver personalized, high quality care.