Get digital identity right with the Imprivata Digital Identity Framework for Healthcare

This post was originally published on the Microsoft Health Blog.

As healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) evolve into highly complex environments including many roles, locations, devices, and applications, we’re challenged to manage these complexities while maintaining security and efficiency, all without adding a lot of disparate tools.

We can all agree that in uncertain times, it’s important to have robust strategies in place to meet increasingly complex demands. In healthcare, we have many layers of strategies: the EHR strategy, the network-system layer strategy, the operating system strategy, and others. At the core of all these complexities and strategies lies digital identity.

Digital identity, especially in healthcare, is the one thing that touches everything. Control of your digital identities and strong identity and access management (IAM) are more important than ever. It’s a necessary secure approach to healthcare delivery but also a critical HIPAA mandate. By focusing on digital identity, organizations can solve their critical workflow, security, and compliance challenges.

Digital Identity has been called the new perimeter, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s really the new control plane and it’s everywhere. It’s managing identities on shared workstations and mobile devices, authorizing access to mission-critical clinical workflows, enabling compliant electronic prescriptions for controlled substances, and doing all this inside the hospital’s four walls, and well beyond.

Today’s healthcare organizations will benefit from a blueprint to help build a unified and integrated digital identity strategy. Powered by Azure Active Directory, Microsoft’s identity platform capabilities enabled Imprivata to accelerate and simplify realization and operationalization of a new digital identity framework for healthcare.

Incorporating complementary solutions from Imprivata and Microsoft, the Imprivata Digital Identity Framework for healthcare presents a unified, security-and-efficiency-focused strategy for managing identities across an HDO’s complex ecosystem of devices, regulations, and applications. The framework addresses key governance and administration, identity management, authorization, and authentication and access functions for the healthcare IT leader to leverage in planning a robust and usable IAM scheme.

The framework is designed specifically to address and support the unique requirements of healthcare providers, drawing from customer feedback and industry-leading schemes, including H-ISAC, Microsoft, Gartner, KuppingerCole, and Forrester, from which more than 120 functions were considered and ultimately tailored.

Digital identity is the next logical step in any HDO’s strategic plan, and we make it easy to identify the key components needed to master IAM in today’s healthcare environment. By putting this framework in place, we’re well on the way to improving operational outcomes with a universal language for healthcare digital identity.

Watch this video to learn more about how we created this framework and how Microsoft and Imprivata together offer the complete digital identity package to help your organization create a next level of secure patient care.