Impactful healthcare/hospital workflows depend on swift functioning of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Systems such as EPIC, Cerner, Kronos, and other systems. These applications are created to bring ease in management of health records. However, many healthcare clients have shared challenges in managing identities and streamline accesses on EMR Systems.
The source of this problem is the flow of identities on the EMR System. If the EMR system is not connected with the true-identity source such as HRMS, Active Directory or IdM System. It will lead to creation of discreet processes, and thereby complicating the flow – causing frustration for IT teams. Fixing such issues can become a tedious task because it takes pulling identities from various sources and streamlining them to be fed to EMR System. It seems to be an easy fix to deploy IT teams to manage identity flow on EMR platforms, but the question is if it is the correct approach.
Here are some important aspects related to the mismanagement of identities on EMR Systems:
Is provisioning of identities on your EMR System real-time?
Ideally, it should be real-time, else what’s the point of talking about automation. Coming back to the real scenario provisioning of providers in the EMR system manually is painfully time-consuming and tedious and this approach needs a re-look.
Does manual effort cause costly errors on your EMR System?
When work is done manually, it can result in inconsistencies – and thus cause errors. Establishing a connection between EMR Systems and IAM/Target Systems platform takes down manual intervention, brings cost benefits and ensures system efficiency.
How identity life cycle events are treated within EMR Systems?
IT teams are simply pushing commands in the EMR System for deprovisioning, change in department, filling in the rooster, etc. These tasks can be integrated with the target source or IAM System for optimal workflow alignment.
That said, it is not suggested that you make changes in your IT System right away. A better idea would be to conduct a thorough gap analysis for how identities are managed for the functioning of the EMR System and cover the following aspects:
- Understand if the user creation process for EMR system can be synchronized with user on-boarding on IAM system/trusted source
- How integration between IAM system/trusted source and EMR System can support user lifecycle management, template assignment, authentication, password management, etc.?
- Does the connection between EMR and IAM/Target System supports all features facilitated by EMR-API?
- Make a comparative analysis of cost of maintaining IT support teams or creating scalable automated integration
- Aim to declutter the system – create a single dashboard to maintain, manage and automate all connected healthcare applications
The points mentioned above must help you in aligning identity management on EMR systems and set the solid groundwork for automating and scaling Healthcare IT Systems.
