Healthcare companies like hospitals must comply with various regulatory mandates like HIPAA, HITECH, ACA, and TEFCA. The list of regulations keeps growing, and one of the key solutions to solving this challenge is a quality Converged Identity and Access Management Solution.
Pain Points of Mid-market Healthcare Companies
- Budget Constraints
- Bandwidth and Expertise Constraints
- Convincing Decision Makers
- Conventional IAM Products don’t integrate with medical devices
CI is the fastest-growing and #1 Converged IAM solution. Within just 2 years of its release in late 2020, it has already grown to the most bought Converged IAM product. It is featured in Gartner’s IGA Market Guide, Gartner’s Access Management Magic Quadrant, KuppingerCole’s Leadership Compass, and Frost & Sullivan’s FROST RADAR. It has won over 20 awards in the last 2 years, most notably “Converged IAM Solution of the Year” at the RSA Summit.
The Unique IAM Requirements of the Healthcare Industry
Cybersecurity is a major issue today. Mid-size healthcare orgs have a particularly difficult time. Patient records are a prime target for hackers. In the US in 2021, more than 19 million records were implicated in healthcare data breaches in the first six months of the year. New viruses are also capable of meddling with medical equipment, like adding tumors to CT scans.
Among industry verticals, healthcare organizations have unique Identity and Access Management (IAM) needs.
- Diverse Access Requirements Among Workforce
In healthcare organizations like hospitals, each doctor and each nurse may require different access depending on their specialty. Cardiac surgeons require a different set of application access from oncologists. A sufficient IAM product must be able to deliver easy and granular provisioning. It must also feature Access Review (aka Access Certification) for compliance and security purposes.
Doctors and nurses also tend to work shifts at multiple hospitals. Not all healthcare employees work for just one company, unlike other industries. The access of part-time employees working at other hospitals must be restricted and checked for toxic combinations that could spell trouble if data is unofficially shared by these employees across hospitals. - Medical Device IAM Integration
Unfortunately, data breaches aren’t the only causes for concern – there have been reports of computer viruses that can potentially even add tumors to CT scans.
Medical devices are becoming increasingly cloud and IT network connected. These machines must also be integrated into the IAM environment. The challenge here is that these devices typically run legacy or homebrew applications. A sufficient IAM platform must be able to integrate with these devices and apps.
Even devices not connected to the cloud should be secure. Thick-client SSO integration is important in a smart mid-market IAM product. - Enforcing Zero-trust is another challenge that has developed over the last few years.
Compliance is a Growing Challenge
As the average world citizen grows in awareness due to access to the internet, better education, and rapid globalization and international exposure, they are demanding civil rights like never before.
Among these, the privacy of data shared with companies like hospitals ranks high. In the early 2000s, data breaches resulted in the public release of millions of patient data records.
To combat this, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) released the HIPAA mandate under the HITECH scheme. The mandate was finally updated in 2013 with the HIPAA Omnibus mandate.
The penalties for violating HIPAA rules are as follows:
Mid-market Specific Challenges
Budget Constraints
Small and midsized healthcare organizations simply don’t have the budget for the most popular IAM products. Okta costs over $120,000/year for 750 users. And it only offers 1/3rd of the required IAM technology to comply with HIPAA. Healthcare organizations must shell out more money to obtain additional products to comply. The total cost can be over $500,000/year!
This is outside of the budget of most mid-market healthcare organizations.
Bandwidth and Expertise Concerns
Small and mid-sized healthcare organizations must focus on the tasks at hand. Patient care comes first.
Mid-market hospitals and other healthcare orgs typically have limited IT expertise on their bench. IAM-trained staff, in particular, are expensive and hard to acquire.
A good mid-market IAM solution that suits the healthcare industry must solve this challenge.
It must be either MSSP (Managed Security Services Provider) delivered, supported by the IAM vendor themselves, or both. This ensures seamless and quick implementation done out-of-house, along with management of the environment.
CI for Mid-market Healthcare Organizations
Pay-Per-Use
CI is the world’s first and only Pay-Per-Use IAM solution. It boasts the lowest entry cost, lowest total cost, and highest ROI of any product on the market. Different organizational departments consume IAM unevenly. Why pay per user when you can pay for consumption?
Auditable Reports
Unlike other IAM software that output raw data, CI generates fully audit-ready HIPAA compliance reports. Reduce manual work, save time, and increase agility. Reduce errors and avoid mistaken non-compliance fines.
MSSPs sell, implement, and maintain your IT security products for you.
CI is the #1 choice of MSSPs due to its all-in-one nature, ease of implementation and maintenance, and zenith OEM vendor support.
Access Review
Access Review (also called Access Certification) is a must today, particularly for industries governed by stringent regulations. Healthcare organizations have multiple statutory mandates to comply with, such as HIPAA, HITECH, ACA, or TEFCA.
HIPAA mandates that user access rights be periodically reviewed. Manual processes for this are tedious and error-prone.
CI has a full Access Review module wherein customers can schedule campaigns and have user access rights evaluated and the results consolidated into audit-ready reports.
Zero-trust Enabled
CI is cutting-edge technology. Which means it is built on Zero-trust architecture. Access attempts, whether from within or outside the company network, are always authorized with the most stringent Adaptive Authentication possible.
Conclusion
The evolving technological and compliance landscape has made a suitable Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution almost mandatory for healthcare organizations. HIPAA, HITECH, ACA, and TEFCA all impose huge fines for non-compliance, up to $1.5m. Such staggering fines can sink a mid-market healthcare company.
Mid-market healthcare organizations need an inexpensive, all-in-one, and feature-rich IAM product. Converged IAM is a new class of technology that is set to account for more than 70% of new IAM implementations by 2025.
Mid-market healthcare organizations also have expertise and bandwidth issues that can be solved through MSSP delivery or quality OEM support or both.
CI is the world’s #1 Converged IAM product.
Delivered as Pay-per-use, it is also the most inexpensive product on the market and with the highest ROI. Customers only pay a small fixed cost towards cloud-hosting, then based on consumption. The entry cost is minimal. The total cost is 1/5th – 1-8th that of other IAM products.
CI is featured in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, KuppingerCole’s Leadership Compass, and Frost & Sullivan’s FROST RADAR. The solution also won “Converged IAM Product of the Year” at the RSA Conference in 2021.
To learn more, visit www.crossidentity.com
