Imprivata and Azure AD help healthcare delivery organizations deliver safe and secure care

[Sue Bohn]

As hospitals and other healthcare delivery organizations accelerate their adoption of virtual care and mobile devices in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s critical that providers can access cloud and on-premises apps quickly and securely. Imprivata is a healthcare-focused digital identity company that addresses this need. For today’s “Voice of the ISV” blog, I invited Kristina Cairns and Mark Erwich of Imprivata to provide insight into how Imprivata’s solutions are helping healthcare organizations deliver care beyond the four walls of the hospitals.

Supporting healthcare delivery organizations during COVID-19

By Kristina Cairns, Director of Product Marketing, Imprivata and Mark Erwich, VP Marketing, Imprivata

In response to COVID-19, hospitals and clinics have turned to remote tools to care for a surge of patients, while protecting the health of staff. These tools let clinicians connect remotely with patients, care teams, and other organizations, but they can be difficult to securely access from shared workstations or mobile devices, such as tablets. Imprivata digital identity solutions simplify access while maintaining security, so clinicians can deliver quality care safely and conveniently—no matter where they are located.

At the same time, healthcare staffing demands are skyrocketing, and these needs must be met in real time. This can mean quickly adding, or provisioning, new or re-allocated staff and ensuring they have proper access to applications, immediately. Once the crisis is over, these same staff will need to be de-provisioned to ensure security and compliance requirements are met.

Imprivata is a digital identity company that focuses on healthcare. We employ doctors and nurses who have a real-world understanding of the unique needs of hospital environments. Our solutions are designed to work with healthcare workflows and regulations, so hospitals can get up and running with new tools and upgrades, fast. In these challenging times, we’ve partnered with Microsoft to provide an integrated identity and access management platform that meets the needs of healthcare organizations. Our joint solutions make it easy to connect to healthcare’s existing identity and application data and automate at scale. Healthcare providers can use our platforms to address unique demands, such as:

• Saving precious time in hospitals: Accessing necessary apps quickly while healthcare providers move between clinical workstations and new networked devices at the point of patient care.
• Protecting healthcare staff and patients: Identifying providers potentially exposed to COVID-19.
• Scaling up remote work and virtual care: Providing remote access to a diverse set of tools spanning on-premises and cloud infrastructure as providers and patients move outside of traditional healthcare environments.
• Simplifying role-based access identity management: Securely manage access for temporary workers and existing staff who change roles or departments.

Saving precious time in hospitals

Healthcare workers are busy in the best of times. They juggle administrative tasks with a full day of patient care. As the pandemic has driven up the number of patients admitted to hospitals, time has become even more precious. Imprivata OneSign is a single sign-on (SSO) solution that enables care providers to spend less time with technology and more time with patients.

During a shift, healthcare workers use several cloud and on-premises applications including business and enterprise applications, electronic health records, medical imaging, patient management, and other systems. Each of these apps in this hybrid environment often requires a unique username and password. Imprivata OneSign eliminates the need for clinicians to memorize and manually enter their credentials. They can sign in once to access all their on-premises and cloud apps, including Microsoft Teams, Office 365, and 3,000+ Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Marketplace applications. No Click Access™ lets them sign in with a badge or fingerprint making it faster to access applications and workflows.

Protecting healthcare staff and patients

As healthcare delivery organizations treat patients under evaluation for COVID-19, they must also safeguard the health of clinicians. Yale New Haven Health is using Imprivata OneSign reporting capabilities to identify exactly where and when specific users accessed specific workstations in different patient care zones in the clinical environment. By combining these data with workstation mapping and electronic health record data, Yale can more accurately identify all providers potentially exposed to COVID-19 and take necessary actions.

Scaling up remote work and virtual care

To limit the spread of COVID-19, administrative roles at clinics and hospitals have migrated to remote work when possible. Care providers have rapidly scaled up virtual care services to provide non-emergency healthcare consultations. These providers need to access systems on personal laptops, mobile devices, and temporary devices in temporary care sites. It’s important that devices and individuals are authenticated to protect sensitive data and apps.

Imprivata Confirm ID for Remote Access improves security by enabling multi-factor authentication for remote network access, cloud applications, Windows servers and desktops, and other critical systems and workflows. Imprivata Confirm ID for EPCS (electronic prescribing of controlled substances) supports Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)-compliant two-factor authentication methods so providers can quickly prescribe drugs using EPCS workflows. To support healthcare organizations during this crisis we are offering Imprivata Confirm ID licenses for free.

 

Simplifying role-based access identity management

As the number of patients increases, hospitals are rapidly re-assigning workers within the organization, while on-boarding clinicians from lower utilized hospitals. Healthcare organizations need easy and secure ways to manage user roles as they scale up and provision temporary workers.

Imprivata Identity Governance is an end-to-end solution with granular, role-based access controls and automated provisioning and de-provisioning. Streamlined auditing processes and analytics enable faster threat evaluation and remediation. These capabilities allow IT to respond to the needs of the organization without sacrificing security. Imprivata Identity Governance ensures that, on day one, the right users have the right access to the right on-premises and cloud applications, and the audit trail to prove it.

Imprivata Identity Governance can now be hosted in an Azure environment, unlocking scalability and flexibility for healthcare enterprises.

Making healthcare technology available to everyone

The following resources can help hospitals and clinics move quickly to support patient care beyond the four walls of the hospitals:

• Take advantage of the six months of free premium Microsoft Teams or remove limits on how many users can join a team or video call.
• Leverage Azure AD and set up single-sign-on to protect against downloading malicious links that often get passed along through emails.
• Turn on Security Defaults and enforce policies through Azure AD Conditional Access.
• Read Top 5 ways Azure AD can help you enable remote work.
• Provide remote workers easy and secure access to networks, applications, and systems with free Confirm ID for Remote Access licenses.
  
  

Learn more

Solutions like the Imprivata Identity and Access Management platform, Microsoft Azure AD, and Microsoft Teams are helping keep healthcare workers productive and safe as they confront the current crises. As healthcare evolves, Microsoft and Imprivata will continue to innovate together to further enhance scenarios for in-person and remote access.

Learn more about Microsoft’s COVID-19 response and Imprivata’s COVID-19 response.

Read about capabilities in Teams that support healthcare workers and other integrations between Microsoft and Imprivata.