Memorial Healthcare System, a 1,900-bed health system located in Hollywood, Fla. is one of the largest public healthcare systems in the U.S. Memorial believes in providing safe, quality, cost-effective, patient- and family-centered care to improve the health of the community it serves.
From an identity governance perspective, Memorial manages more than 24,000 accounts. With a small access team—at one point consisting of one manager, two system admins, and four system analysts— provisioning manually was becoming infeasible. IT leadership recognized the need to move from a manual provisioning process to an automated process that would streamline the workflow. The team at Memorial believed that implementing the right technology would greatly improve efficiency for their clinicians and physicians.
Previously, Memorial’s provisioning process required that team members manually create every account for the system’s employees and vendors. The Memorial team sought a provisioning solution that would:
- Automate their provisioning processes and streamline workflows
- Act as a centralized provisioning source
- Work as an integrated platform with single sign-on (SSO) for comprehensive identity and access management.
“It’s part of our mission to be secure and safe, to ensure that we are able to keep track of that in a very systematic way. And what better way to do that then leveraging technology rather than using manual processes,” said Oscar Perez, Vice President of IT at Memorial Healthcare System.
Memorial chose Imprivata Identity Governance™, an end-to-end solution with precise role-based access controls, automated provisioning and de-provisioning, streamlined auditing processes, and analytics that enable faster threat evaluation and remediation.
This new system automatically creates a complete account for each new user, enabling this user with the correct level of access to applications for their designated role, providing day-1 access so users can be productive immediately. The automation, in turn, simplifies the provisioning process, eliminating the time IT would take to manually administer access to certain applications. In addition to the onboarding process, transfers and terminations are processed automatically after approval from Human Resources, saving analysts hours of work so they can focus their time and efforts elsewhere.
“The amount of time that we’re saving creating accounts is priceless,” said Ana Agostini, Administrative Director of IT Services at Memorial.
Automating periodic access review (PAR) for line managers
The team at Memorial realized that working in a manual fashion with Excel spreadsheets was time-consuming, inefficient, and error-prone. With patient safety being of prime importance, Memorial wanted to ensure patient information was safe when accounts were terminated at the hospital. The periodic access review process allows Memorial to monitor access for employees and maintain security.
By implementing Imprivata Identity Governance, Memorial was able to automate the periodic access review process. With the automated process, it is easy to conduct their quarterly reviews, and they achieve 100 percent compliance from over 700 plus leaders throughout the organization. Validating the access that their employees have, for the right applications and in very short time, is sound governance for Memorial.
“I think we are achieving success in the sense that we are making this totally seamless, totally transparent, and automatic for our physicians and our clinicians,” confirmed Dr. Dawn-Marie Rogers, Chief Medical Information Officer at Memorial.
Integrated IAM solution
By integrating automated identity management with enterprise single sign-on and authentication management, also from Imprivata, Memorial has:
- Reduced IT costs and help desk calls
- Increased data security and improved auditing processes
- Shifted clinician focus to providing high-quality care, instead of having to figure out or overcome frustrations with technology.
Results
By implementing end-to-end identity life cycle management, Memorial has seen drastic time savings in creating user accounts. The standardized provisioning environment has also offered Memorial a compliant platform for auditing and reporting that meet the industry’s best practices. The Memorial team feels confident they are improving patient outcomes while providing the best technology platform for their clinicians and patients.
