May 27, 2020

Few industries have been impacted by Covid-19, but none more so than healthcare. In this identity Talk, we catch up with SailPoint’s AVP of Healthcare Matthew Radcliffe to learn why healthcare organizations need identity governance to keep patient and clinical data safe.

Video Transcript

Hannah Giles: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Identity Talks. Today we’re going to be talking about healthcare with SailPoint’s AVP of Healthcare Matthew Radcliffe. Matthew, thank you for joining us.

Matthew Radcliffe: Hi, Hannah. How are you today?

Hannah Giles: Doing great, beautiful sunny day here in Austin and I’m excited for this conversation today.

Matthew Radcliffe: I am as well. Thank you.

Hannah Giles: Awesome. Well, so let’s just jump right in. You’ve been in healthcare for a long time, which is why we have you here. And many industries, as we know, have been affected by COVID, but none really more so than healthcare. So, from a technology perspective, how has the pandemic affected how healthcare organizations, think about identity?

Matthew Radcliffe: Yeah, thanks Hannah. I mean, here’s, here’s the reality if you step back a couple years, right healthcare organizations would, would think of identity as you know, hey, this is a great productivity tool and automation tool. And when we get the time and budget we will get around to doing that. Right. I mean, it was kind of thought it as a as a tool of convenience. I think more of the forward-looking healthcare organizations were proactive, proactively investing in the identity governance solutions. But there were still quite a number of healthcare organizations, you know, I would say, sitting on the sidelines and thinking about the right time to inject identity governance, but the fact is, is when COVID-19 came upon all of us with, with really, you know, it was a surprise for everyone. I think in a lot of cases health corps, healthcare organizations were caught a bit off guard, right. All of a sudden they had this large influx of patients and their current staffing couldn’t support the treatment of the volume of patients they were seeing. So in many cases healthcare organizations were forced very quickly, with little notice they had to onboard lots, lots more physicians contracted nurses and many cases even volunteer nurses, contractors. And then in parallel a lot of the traditional staff that was onsite was being moved offsite of the hospital. Really to protect them and essentially non, nonessential personnel were moving off site and now all of a sudden, they needed remote access, they needed permissions that they typically weren’t granted. So for those organizations that didn’t have solutions like SailPoint in place, this actually became a very painful exercise. With no notice they were provisioning thousands of identities literally on a, on a daily basis.

The great news is what we heard from a lot of our current healthcare customers was you know, hey SailPoint if, if we didn’t have you, we couldn’t even imagine how we would have managed through this process. We have a couple customers in the New York City area that were literally managing up to 15,000 new clinicians within a three to five week period. This in a normal day to day operation would have been a very painful task, but because they had SailPoint they were very quickly and effectively able to onboard these new clinical caregivers, quickly give them access to the clinical systems they needed to treat patients and really get them quickly to focus on treating patients, rather than trying to figure out how to give them that access. And on the other side, those that were removed offsite leveraging our tools, they were very quickly able to update role models to now allow those users that have remote access permissions and other security permissions that typically that role would not have granted them. So it’s, it had a, you know, the pandemic for sure was nothing that any of us wanted. It put quite a burden on a lot of IT organizations, but in healthcare it really put a spotlight on the value that our solutions provide to, to really, you know, a lot of national large healthcare organizations.

Hannah Giles: Yeah, that’s certainly scales it for us. So I guess my next question for you, then, is, is this a, is this a permanent shift? Is this something that’s impacting the future of identity?

Matthew Radcliffe: Yeah, I think there’s, there’s two ways to look at it. First of all, we all keep talking about the new norm right and the new norm is we are going to have a larger percentage of staff work off site. Right, they’ve now determined that hey this business model is not necessarily all that bad. There is some population of resources that, that can work from, from home or work from a remote workplace. So they are they are seeing benefits in that long term strategy. And with that, you need stronger security solutions, you need stronger governance solutions to help administer those permissions and make sure that you have a tight wrapper around controlling access from, from a remote workforce.

The other aspect of that is coming out of COVID, all these users were very rapidly brought on board, those organizations that did not have SailPoint or a solution like SailPoint. They really now have to kind of untie that web, right all these people were quickly brought on board. They were given access and in many cases without a lot of thought in terms of the role they would serve, what kind of access they needed. Their goal was, hey, give them access get them treating patients. But now they still have compliance mandates that they have to remain compliant to so now they have to unwind that access. You know, try to figure out who did we give access to, what access needs to be remediated or terminated. And then clean all that up and we actually see that that process is going to take 12 to 18 months in many cases. So, we’re seeing the need to actually accelerate for those customers that were either evaluating a solution like SailPoint or headed in a future plan. They’re actually accelerating their acquisition of SailPoint to actually help automate back that, get the visibility in terms of who they granted access to. Clean up that access, remediate inappropriate access and then really create an automated process moving forward to manage those identities. So we believe that there is going to be a lasting impact and then a lot of cases or prospective customers have communicated that you know this really put a spotlight on some gaps we have and, and they’re accelerating their identity governance strategy moving forward. So, we see the need for SailPoint actually growing exponentially within, within the provider space.

Hannah Giles: Thank you so much Matthew that was great information and until next time, this has been Identity Talks.

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