IAM for healthcare: What health IT security leaders should expect

Ten years ago, most health system IT leaders did not have Identity and Access Management (IAM) at the top of their priority lists. Provisioning and de-provisioning was primarily a manual operation, done by the IT staff. But today most CIOs and CISOs recognize the need for a sophisticated IAM strategy that is tailored to healthcare’s unique requirements.

Why the change? To help Security and IT executives understand, Imprivata, in collaboration with Healthcare Innovation, authored a whitepaper outlining key areas of healthcare’s digital identity lifecycle, important regulations, and top security issues that have led to greater investments in IAM, including:

• Escalating enforcement of HIPAA and HITECH mandates
• Increasingly serious cyber security threats.

A successful IAM strategy is dependent on how well an organization can streamline its approach to identity governance. Organizations should implement a solution that saves time and automates provisioning and de-provisioning processes, eliminating the need to manually connect the identities and roles of users to the correct level of access to applications. The solution should also make it simple to generate license usage and compliance reports, enabling organizations to more easily meet audit requirements. The result of this approach is increased productivity and stronger security.

The whitepaper further explores the benefits of a complete IAM strategy and stresses the importance of implementing a seamless solution that is built around healthcare’s unique requirements.

To learn more about Identity and Access Management for Healthcare, click here to read the full whitepaper.