A Healthy Investment

Maintaining Identity in Healthcare

Well managed access to IT systems is of critical importance in healthcare. The sector is trusted, expected and legally required to maintain strict patient confidentiality.

But the medical IT environment, with its increasingly open technology infrastructure and vast numbers of passing users, can be difficult to police… unless you have an Ignition™ appliance.

This enterprise-class identity and access management system gives network administrators complete control over which users have access to each area of the IT system, by utilizing a powerful, fine-grained policy engine that does identity routing based on any number and combinations of variables.

The Identity Management Issue

Healthcare institutions need to be concerned about identity management for a number of reasons, including:

• It’s easier than ever to get on the network. As hospitals and healthcare centers turn to wireless networks to improve employee productivity, the potential for unauthorized access grows. Now you do not even need an Ethernet port to access to sensitive information.

• It’s a legal requirement. HIPAA regulation over patient privacy in the US requires network administrators to effectively safeguard access to patient information.

• Information access management is complicated by the fragmented nature of healthcare provision. When you have some records held centrally in a hospital, others in an off-site unit, and still more in outlying pharmacies or clinics, how do you ensure they are all managed securely?

• The healthcare environment presents particular challenges regarding tracking network users. A busy hospital is packed with employees, contractors, patients, friends and relatives and other visitors, any of which may have a reason to access the network. Administrators need to make sure this access is restricted.

The Perfect Prescription

Ignition addresses all of these issues and more, helping IT teams rest easy in the knowledge that each person who accesses the network is automatically granted a restricted set of privileges in accordance with the organization’s business rules.

The appliance is built on an open platform, with an XML-based API that speaks all major directory languages and is expandable as the needs arise, so Ignition is also an invaluable tool when it comes to integrating new health centers and units into the organization.

The Ignition guest user functionality provides an immediate solution to the growing demand for patient and visitor network access by making it as easy for non-technical, administrative personnel to provision appropriate network access for temporary users, including the ability to automatically time out the access at the anticipated end of the need. Issuing network access can be as easy as issuing a ID wrist band.

Best of all, this added security and flexibility comes with almost an immediate ROI through the promise of administrative savings and improved compliance.