Data reigns supreme in today’s digital world. This is doubly true in healthcare, where accurate patient information and effective technology use are key to optimizing processes for positive patient outcomes.
With healthcare organizations battling resource constraints and struggling to maintain financial stability in a tough economy, technology investments can be a significant cost. It’s critical for IT leaders to make every penny count to optimize their tech stack. Many organizations are already utilizing access management solutions in their workflows. But when coupled with robust data analytics technology, organizations can gain more visibility into their environment and user behaviors to improve security and workflow efficiency.
Make the most of access management
A strong access management strategy helps healthcare organizations control and secure access to important data, like protected health information (PHI). The best access management tools will streamline workflows for users and clinicians by making access seamless and secure.
These solutions facilitate high-quality patient care. Leveraging passwordless technologies like biometrics and smartcards for single sign-on (SSO) and multifactor authentication are essential for saving time and enhancing security, particularly when workflows require repeated authentication. For instance, the electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS) requires several factors of authentication on different modalities. With the use of DEA-compliant passwordless solutions, organizations can save time and ensure security and compliance.
For complex industries like healthcare where no workflow is “one-size fits all,” leveraging access data is critical to optimizing both workflows and IT investments. By better understanding workforce challenges like failed login attempts to systems and applications, adoption issues, and user efficiency, organizations can make better informed decisions about future tech adoption.
Leverage your usage data with access management analytics
One way to maximize the benefits of access management software investments is to add analytics to your access security strategy. Examining data on how, when, where, and why clinicians are accessing systems and applications can be used to provide actionable insights that take benefits to the next level.
Gaining insights into access management data allows organizations to visualize the value of providing clinicians with secure and convenient access to applications, track security risks, drive adoption, optimize workflows, and save on IT operational spend.
The benefits of access management analytics
By making time savings and usage patterns observable, healthcare organizations can better understand the impact their access management tools have on clinical workflows and identify paths to further improvements.
Here are some specific examples:
- Strengthen security with failed login analysis: By monitoring failed logins, IT teams can better understand user experience challenges, or detect potential security risks, enabling proactive IT management
- Maximize technology ROI: By tracking clinician login patterns across shared workstations, remote access, and mobile devices, IT teams can pinpoint challenges, promote user adoption, and uncover potential savings in IT operations
- Time savings analysis: By evaluating which login methods save the most hours and reduce the most keystrokes, IT teams can quantify the time savings benefits of your access management tools and guide decisions on workflow improvements
- Application optimization: By analyzing usage data for SSO applications and endpoints, IT teams can identify underutilized resources, address gaps in adoption, and identify opportunities for reducing operational spend
Access management analytics
Whether your IT team calculates metrics like authorization failure rate themselves, or uses analytics software that calculates these metrics for them, access management data can help healthcare organizations augment the benefits of access control and security, while identifying new ways to optimize workflows and technology ROI.
Zach Blunt is the Vice President of Product Management at Imprivata. To learn more about Imprivata, visit http://www.imprivata.com.