June 11, 2018

Many healthcare organizations place a heavy emphasis on keeping outsiders out of their IT infrastructure. While the value of perimeter security is undeniable, what do you do once an outsider gets inside?

With the volume and impact of costly security breaches on the rise, it has become increasingly apparent that providers must place identity at the heart of any program to ensure secure access, maintain compliance and reduce risk. 

Data Access Challenges for Healthcare Providers 

The digitization of healthcare continues to change the threat landscape. Among the more difficult challenges is the proper and efficient governance of user identities and their access to patient data and other sensitive information. Consider these examples.

  • With provider organizations using hundreds of applications and systems to store and transmit sensitive information, administrators and data owners face the daunting task of consistently governing access to mitigate breach and compliance risk. 
  • The need for data sharing continues to rise with ongoing mergers and acquisitions, growth of accountable care organizations, and the advent of health information exchanges. However, exchanging digital information can lead to the improper exposure of data. A response to any crisis around data security could have a significant impact on speed-of-operation for clinical and operational teams.
  • The ever-increasing presence of personal devices (BYOD) within the provider-care setting means more data access points to manage. Such an environment broadens the scope of managing data from determining who should have access to what and when, to include how data is accessed. These complexities require a sophisticated level of security that balances against the need for prompt data access through the clinicians’ native workflow.

Address Access Challenges through Identity 

  • Deliver timely and appropriate access to patient records by giving healthcare providers greater visibility and control of who has access to what, when and where. 
  • Reduce operational costs by streamlining access to systems and applications and improving data sharing between clinicians. 
  • Enable confident data sharing by mitigating risk of exposing sensitive information to unauthorized users.
  • Drive compliance through process documentation for audits. 

A Comprehensive Approach 

Many identity governance programs focus solely on managing access to applications and structured systems, with the notion that the data within these applications is fully protected. However, through the normal course of business, this data is extracted and exported by users to create reports, presentations and other user-generated content. As a result, it is common to find sensitive information across a variety of ungoverned file storage systems. This typically means provider organizations have minimal control and visibility to where these files reside, what data the files contains, and how that information is being used.

By 2021, organizations with complementary/integrated IGA and DAG capabilities will suffer 60% fewer data breaches.

By extending identity governance processes beyond systems and applications to also include data stored in files, healthcare providers can apply the same access controls across the data most used by the business.

Through SailPoint, provider organizations can locate, classify and manage access to data files containing sensitive content (HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, etc.) whether the information resides, on premises or in the cloud. 

An Intelligent Solution

Healthcare organizations cannot govern what they cannot see. To enforce security policies and reduce risky behavior, it is essential for IT administrators and data owners to monitor, analyze and quickly synthesize every identity interaction with every piece of data and application (clinical or non-clinical). 

While this may sound daunting, it is achievable. Incorporating artificial intelligence can do the heavy lifting by ingesting vast amounts of identity and event data to provide advanced insights to gain greater efficiencies and mitigate risk.

By deploying this technology, SailPoint solutions can perform peer group analysis, behavioral pattern matching and statistical analysis to detect and alert anomalous behaviors and potential risks. This next-generation technology can then be used to contextualize and focus identity governance controls on high-risk scenarios, such as inappropriate access and compliance gaps. 

Through machine-learning capabilities, provider organizations can supercharge their identity governance processes. 

SailPoint Features and Benefits

  • Reduce inconsistencies by unifying the governance approach to multiple systems and applications, including EHRs such as Epic and Cerner, through numerous out-of-the-box connectors and integration modules. 
  • Improve security coverage by locating, identifying and applying access controls to sensitive data files. 
  • Mitigate risk by applying artificial intelligence to gain deep insight on anomalous access.
  • Maintain compliance by deploying business-friendly access certification, streamlining audit reporting and documentation, and automating policy management. 
  • Manage access for all users to all systems, applications and data files located on premises or in the cloud. 
  • Streamline processes through secure self-service access, automated provisioning and deprovisioning, and password sync to drive efficiency and improve operational workflow.
  • Minimize blind spots by aggregating multiple access rights associated with a single identity due to multiple personas/roles.

Get to Know SailPoint

Whether it’s managing identities with multiple roles (personas), classifying and managing HIPAA-and GDPR-related content wherever the files reside or integrating with clinical applications to deliver a unified approach to governing access, SailPoint provides capabilities that are specifically relevant to healthcare providers. 

In addition, SailPoint continues to be recognized by Gartner as the leading authority in Identity Governance for the past six consecutive years. Forrester and KuppingerCole have also recognized SailPoint similarly. Discover how comprehensive, intelligent identity from SailPoint can help healthcare providers take security to the next level while optimizing operational workflow. Visit Identity for Healthcare.

  1. Gartner Identity and Access Summit November 2017

Find out how SailPoint can help your organization.

*required field