Identity and access management, or IAM, has become the bread and butter standard for managing both people and equipment connected to a network. The threat is ever growing of someone seeking your data for their own reasons. Their methods are extensive and constantly evolving. Healthcare databases are considered prime targets given how much personal data they collect on patients as well as businesses who support a medical provider. IAM for healthcare provides an essential defense approach that is established correctly. In the healthcare setting, this kind of effective and proactive management is essential, both to maintain the system’s effectiveness as well as to protect patient information and data.

How IAM Improves Healthcare System Management

IAM takes a top-down approach to every individual and equipment node connected and provides it a profile. This then allows access to be compartmentalized, a key defense in preventing overall system breaches and takeovers.

Then the principle of least privilege can be applied, allowing users and equipment to connect but blocking anything and anyone from having multiple access points. Combined with a cloud management approach, IAM in healthcare can be expanded well beyond the traditional LAN model, including parties and players from different aspects, including patients, suppliers, employees, third parties, and temporary reviewers such as auditors and regulators.

Due to the flexibility of IAM management, security defense, and response are far more flexible. Because of the profile approach, potential risks can be cordoned off, monitored, and even cut off en masse in an instance. Automation allows security to be applied 24/7, providing an easy transition for common transactions while still maintaining digital protection and avoiding an open barn door situation with too much flexibility.

Compliance Assistance

IAM systems, particularly those in the cloud, make it far easier to see the span and capacity of a healthcare system portfolio, which makes it far easier to be responsive to compliance requirements as well as to see weaknesses easier. This then makes it far more efficient for healthcare providers to stay within regulatory compliance, especially in areas where there needs to be established protection for patient data protection, the transfer of confidential data, and the tracking of access to that data as well.

With the constant increase in digital interaction, and the expectation that healthcare will stay on par with the ability to use that information to help patients as well as manage medical care better, healthcare organizations have no option but to consider IAM when it comes to practical, effective digital management of their systems. Not doing so is simply asking for trouble.