Why automated user provisioning is crucial in health care institution and here's how you ensure it ✅

Securing access to electronic medical records and clinical apps is of utmost importance in the healthcare sector, especially with ever-evolving compliance regulations. With proper user provisioning and supervisory workflows, IT admins can streamline access, safeguard protected health information (PHI), and ensure the efficiency of healthcare operations.

Challenges

IT staff time wasted on manual operations

The average US hospital workforce turnover was 100.5% in the past five years. Without an efficient user provisioning solution, IT admins are forced to spend hundreds of hours manually creating and modifying thousands of user accounts, tracking and off-boarding inactive accounts, and managing access permissions to critical clinical apps and EMRs.

Existing legacy applications with limited capabilities

Writing PowerShell scripts to implement complex tailored automations for repetitive tasks can not only be difficult to manage and error prone, but increases the burden on the admin team. This severely affects productivity and distracts admins from matters that deserve their attention.

Risk of manually provisioning temporary accounts

Healthcare institutions are dependent on multiple external parties, including pharmacists, outsourced security staff, and external emergency service providers. Manually provisioning various user access rights for these contingent staff can be error prone and could compromise the institution's data security.

Ensuring compliance with regulations like HIPPA and HITECH Act

Healthcare institutions have to comply with multiple IT regulations like HIPAA and HITECH, so manually handling permissions to PHI can be risky. Lack of supervision in access management and an inability to keep track of manual actions can lead to heavy penalties and revocation of licenses for clinicians.

Inability to detect stale accounts

Manual de-provisioning can be tiresome and subject to errors, but failing to properly disable accounts will cause them to become stale or orphaned, which means they can be misused by ex-employees and other external threats. The healthcare sector is at an elevated risk from stale accounts, with one report indicating that 79% of institutions have more than 1,000 orphaned accounts.

Lack of automated workflows with supervision

Healthcare institutions have a dynamic environment. Therefore, managing permissions manually or through custom workflows with PowerShell scripts is neither viable nor sustainable and will need to be continuously revised and supervised by IT admins.

Solution

Automated lifecycle management

Using ADManager Plus, you can automate the entire lifecycle of your medical staff, operational staff, and external stakeholders (such as pharmacists, outsourced security staff, and emergency service providers). Moreover, this facilitates timely de-provisioning of accounts, thereby eliminating any chances for stale accounts to remain undetected in your organization.

Enterprise-ready integrations

ADManager Plus can be integrated with your HCM solutions like UKG Pro and Workday with API support, and databases like MS SQL or Oracle to automatically provision accounts in your AD and other cloud platforms.

Role-based access control

Using ADManager Plus, healthcare institutions can ensure accurate provisioning based on user roles to provide necessary access to cloud applications and other resources, including EMRs . This ensures that physicians, nurses, receptionists, and even temporary users have only the access required to carry out their duties without compromising data security.

Delegated administration

Empower key personnel such as physicians, HODs, senior operational staff with delegated or limited administrative rights, allowing them to take care of repetitive functions such as onboarding and off-boarding team members, modifying permissions, and allocating and removing group members. This reduces dependencies on IT admin staff and gives them more time to focus on more critical tasks in AD management.

Just-in-time access

Manage ad-hoc requests for temporary users with Just-In-Time (JIT) access by provisioning limited yet adequate user rights for a specified time period.

Enhanced review-approval workflows

Utilize review-approval workflows to supervise and track audit trails of every activity carried out by clinicians, support staff, and contingent users in your institution. This process aids institutions in adhering to compliance mandates and ensures sensitive information such as PHI is safely protected.