Helping Healthcare Organizations to Build Digital Businesses Creating digital identity ecosystems that connect and secure users, internet-connected things, and cloud services
Summary Rising costs, aging populations, the proliferation of chronic diseases, and the expectation of affordable, effective care are serious challenges for healthcare organizations. To address these issues, healthcare providers are becoming digital businesses, using technology to access, share, and analyze patient information in order to efficiently deliver healthcare. This means healthcare providers must build new digital identity ecosystems across users, connected things, and cloud services. Protecting patient privacy remains a priority for digital initiatives, as organizations must ensure compliance with data-sharing laws like HIPAA and the EU Data Protection Regulation. Secure, unified digital ecosystems are a critical step towards improving access to quality, lower-cost healthcare. ForgeRock ties patients, connected things, and cloud services to unique digital identities that can interact and form relationships. This creates an opportunity for healthcare providers to offer personalized, high-touch care. By establishing and securing these digital identities, ForgeRock builds digital businesses for the modern healthcare organization. Market Challenges Market challenges facing healthcare organizations transitioning into digital businesses include: Increasing patient privacy concerns and regulations around data protection and sharing Inability to seamlessly connect users, devices, and cloud services, leading to fragmented healthcare delivery Lack of continuous, intelligent security, leading to greater risk of data breaches and networked equipment breaches Disjointed, institutional, and impersonal patient experience across myriad digital channels Inhibitive, proprietary legacy identity systems that cannot support digital customer demands and business requirements and limit healthcare innovation and new patient services Connected health means systematically applying healthcare information technology to facilitate the accessing and sharing of information, and to enable the subsequent analysis of health data across healthcare systems...but connected health goes beyond simply managing and analyzing patients clinical data. It encourages communication and collaboration among all the stakeholders involved in a patient s health to get to improved care and better health outcomes at lower costs. Making the Case for Connected Healthcare, Accenture
At ForgeRock, we believe these market challenges can be overcome by relying on the 5 pillars of successful digital business: Solution: 5 Pillars of Digital Business 1. Privacy Empowerment 2. Secure Internet of Things 3. Contextual Security 4. Personalized Customer Experience 5. The Open Source Way Privacy Empowerment As increasing numbers of users--from patients to providers--and connected devices and services go online, healthcare organizations are playing catch up, racing to ensure and protect privacy. The data they are tasked with protecting is highly valuable not only to their organization, but to the users it is attached to as well. Patient confidentiality is critical for the healthcare organization. Keeping personal data secure is not just about regulatory compliance; it is also about building trust and protecting patient relationships. To guard patient privacy, organizations must ensure that the identities of users, connected things, and cloud services are verified and authorized. Healthcare providers are saddled with the tough task of not only securing sensitive health data, but also sharing it with the relevant people, organizations, and devices that need it to provide optimal care. ForgeRock builds secure, trusted, and transparent digital relationships across new digital offerings. Healthcare providers can give patients control over their health data with user-managed access. Now, patients can determine who gets access to their data, for how long, and under what conditions. Patients can authorize data sharing with the appropriate doctors and care providers to enable greater collaboration between healthcare stakeholders. This digital transformation is an opportunity to develop new, innovative systems that increase healthcare efficiency and effectiveness. Secure Internet of Things Legacy identity systems cannot seamlessly connect users, devices, and cloud services. As a result, organizations cannot build meaningful digital relationships with their patients and fail to deliver personalized health services. These outdated systems cannot leverage the opportunities that come with the rise of the internet of things. ForgeRock s flexible, scalable digital identity platform empowers healthcare organizations to create seamless user experiences across channels by tying users, connected things, and cloud services to digital identities, connected within a digital identity ecosystem. Within this ecosystem, ForgeRock can register users, services, and connected things, link them together, authorize and de-authorize their access to data, and apply policies that dictate security practices and personalization. This interconnected approach unifies patient identity and gives healthcare organizations a better understanding of patient needs by looking at the big picture. Healthcare providers can modernize their services by building digital identity ecosystems that support user-friendly new technologies that come with the internet of things.
Contextual Security Healthcare providers are under tremendous pressure to ensure the security of patient personal health data. It is no longer sufficient to simply authenticate and authorize users. Now, systems must perpetually monitor activity to detect suspicious behavior and unusual circumstances that could reveal a malicious actor. The authenticity of digital relationships must be constantly verified and organizations must be able to revoke access if necessary. ForgeRock provides continuous security for connected users, things, and cloud services. It is not just a matter of credentials; it is a matter of circumstance. Does the patient, doctor, nurse, or device usually log in from Thailand? Do they usually log in from a desktop computer? What time does the login usually occur? What kind of data do they usually access? There are additional ways to authenticate the legitimacy of the user s identity and their access rights, whether with text codes, emails, security questions, or biometrics. If behavior is suspicious, patient data can be secured. With constant vigilance, context is king. Personalized Customer Experience Many healthcare providers struggle with fragmented patient profiles that can lead to inefficient care and human error as the information must be manually aggregated. There is no single view of the patient due to the siloed nature of healthcare data. Unified customer profiles improve efficiency and enable collaboration across healthcare organizations. Healthcare organizations choose the ForgeRock platform because it can consolidate the identity data of users, connected things, and cloud services, so every department and every employee can respond to patients with the knowledge of who they are and what their needs are. It is relationship-based identity management that creates personalized and meaningful interactions between healthcare providers and their patients. The easier it is to link identities and share data between stakeholders like doctor and patient, the greater the advantage for the organization. By offering the best patient experience, healthcare providers can differentiate themselves from the competition. The Open Source Way Most healthcare organizations are saddled with proprietary legacy identity systems that are rigid, opaque, and unable to scale to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving digital businesses. Organizations have limited collaborative input in system development and are required to use whatever services vendors provide. ForgeRock offers an enterprise-class open source identity platform that is production-ready for hundreds of millions of users. Healthcare providers gain transparency around the development process as open source gives organizations visibility into development. They can also contribute code for incorporation into product; after all, they have the ultimate window into current and future identity needs across the business. ForgeRock is committed to building collaborative partnerships with organizations to realize a shared vision.
Conclusion In order to remain competitive and effective in the modern world, healthcare organizations must embrace the shift to digital business. A scalable, flexible, and secure digital identity ecosystem is necessary to protect sensitive health data and deliver personalized, high quality care. To learn more about the transformation of healthcare, download the following Accenture reports and ForgeRock Customer Case Study. Recommended Reading & Additional Resources Accenture: Making the Case for Connected Health Accenture: Top 5 ehealth Trends ForgeRock Customer Case Study: Availity SAN FRANCISCO VANCOUVER OSLO BRISTOL GRENOBLE LONDON +1-415-599-1100 +1-360-229-7105 +47-2108-1746 +44-117-223-2167 +33-625-14-96-92 +44-20-3598-4786 SINGAPORE +65-6709-5705 About ForgeRock The ForgeRock Identity Platform transforms the way millions of customers and citizens interact with businesses and governments online, providing better security, building relationships, and enabling new cloud, mobile, and IoT offerings from any device or connected thing. ForgeRock serves hundreds of brands like Morningstar, Vodafone, GEICO, TomTom, and Pearson, as well as governments like Norway, Canada, and Belgium, among many others. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, ForgeRock has offices in London, Bristol, Grenoble, Oslo, Singapore, and Vancouver, Washington. ForgeRock is privately held, backed by leading global venture capital firms Accel Partners, Foundation Capital, and Meritech Capital. For more information and free downloads, visit http://www.forgerock.com or follow ForgeRock on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/forgerock. ForgeRock is the trademark of ForgeRock Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and in other countries. FORGEROCK.COM