Digital identity framework

Healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) have evolved into highly complex environments with many users and roles, locations, devices, and applications. These complexities demand a cohesive approach to managing the digital identity – which lives at the core of the modern identity and access management (IAM) strategy.

Introducing the digital identity framework

The Imprivata digital identity framework for healthcare presents a unified, security- and efficiency-focused strategy to managing identities across the HDO’s complex ecosystem. The framework addresses key governance and administration, identity management, authorization, and access and authentication functions for the healthcare IT leader to leverage in planning a robust and usable IAM scheme.

The Imprivata digital identity framework: A guide for IT leaders in healthcare

This guide provides CISOs, CIOs, and other IT leaders a toolkit to drive their IAM strategy, along with insights about how healthcare considerations must necessarily govern solution choices.

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The Imprivata digital identity framework for healthcare — a deep dive with Wes

Wes Wright, CTO at Imprivata, offers insight into the Imprivata digital identity framework for healthcare as a holistic approach to identity and access management tailored to healthcare.

A deeper dive

The Imprivata framework is structured according to the key categories required for a robust digital identity strategy that meets healthcare’s unique demands. These categories are: governance and administration, identity management, authorization, and access and authentication. As described below, the categories are ordered in the framework to support the planning process, beginning with the end in mind.

Governance and administration

Starting with governance and administration, identify the standards with which your organization will need to comply, including the reports you’ll need to do so.

What’s important for healthcare?

An effective solution will provide dashboards from which you can track which clinical staff are accessing which applications, monitor patient privacy and potential drug diversions, and generate audit summaries – for example, reports of EPCS activities as part of a DEA-adherent process.

Image of a businessman and a doctor talking with each other

Products that support governance and administration

Imprivata Identity Governance | Imprivata Mobile | Imprivata OneSign
Imprivata Confirm ID | Imprivata PatientSecure | Imprivata FairWarning

Identity management

Next is identity management, where IT and HR specify your sources of truth for users and plan for the provisioning and lifecycle management of human and non-human entities, including mobile and medical devices in hybrid environments.

What’s important for healthcare?

An IAM solution for healthcare must integrate closely with the HDO’s identity sources for diverse roles, from clinicians in the hospital to visiting nurses and physicians, as well as the numerous applications and workflows – such as EHR software – found in today’s clinical environments.

The effective IAM solution also helps the HDO manage risk by providing the tools needed to adjust access entitlements based on continuous monitoring and anomaly detection, including access to patient records and controlled substances.

Image of a doctor and a man looking at a smart tablet together

Products that support identity management

Imprivata Identity Governance | Imprivata Mobile | Imprivata FairWarning

Authorization

The authorization stage is where policies and access rules are built into the IAM system, to govern which data and applications are to be accessed by which users according to their roles, rights, and responsibilities.

What’s important for healthcare?

In the hospital environment, care providers may take on different roles that change from shift to shift as staff rotates. A practitioner could serve as an emergency department physician one day and an administrative physician, performing oversight duties, the next. This complex environment of “one beating heart (or identity), multiple roles” demands appropriate authorization to access the tools clinicians need without delay.

Image of a surgeon using a touchscreen on a medical device

Products that support authorization

Imprivata Identity Governance | Imprivata OneSign | Imprivata Confirm ID
Imprivata PatientSecure | Imprivata FairWarning

Authentication and access

The final step is authentication and access, which is the execution phase. Here, users are authenticated and granted access to cloud, on-premises, and mobile applications used on a variety of endpoints.

What’s important for healthcare?

Access control and authentication functions need to sync with clinical staff operations to enable real-time patient care. Clinicians use a variety of applications on a multitude of endpoints – from shared workstations to mobile and medical devices. An IAM solution must integrate closely with these varied applications and devices to quickly authenticate and grant access to the mission-critical resources a clinician requires.

Image of a lab employee using a touch screen desktop device

Products that support authentication and access

Imprivata Identity Governance | Imprivata Mobile | Imprivata OneSign | Imprivata Confirm ID