The UAE is digitising rapidly. Government programmes make it clear how important technologies like blockchain, AI, the Internet of Things, and 5G are to sustainable progress. Healthcare, like other industries, has taken the digital plunge. Accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis, hospitals and clinics across the land invested in the future to transform and optimise information flow, improve care efficiency, and enhance the patient experience.
For example, telemedicine is cheaper, safer, and more convenient for the patient while rationalising the use of resources for the provider. The nation’s telemedicine market could, according to one estimate, reach more than US$536.5 million by 2025, exhibiting a CAGR of 25 per cent over the five years from 2020. Virtual visits alone, which were worth US$73.5 million in 2020, could leap to US$280.7 million by 2025 – a CAGR of more than 30 per cent.
But delivering excellent digital experiences in healthcare does not come without challenges. The industry has traditionally trailed other sectors, such as FSI, on individualisation. Entities are hampered by many factors, including a lack of interoperability options between providers and a reticence to share patient data for fear of being at odds with privacy regulators. Meanwhile, outdated authentication processes also get in the way of progress. But if we are to deliver a better experience to patients, we must be able to track them as a retail business would – across multiple identities, sessions, facilities, and networks. It is how we eliminate treatment delays and improve care outcomes. We often talk about “Patient 360”, the assembly of information over time that can give a longitudinal record of care that begets better care as time goes on. To deliver this level of care, we need to overcome our barriers.
Customer identity and access management (CIAM) solves many of these issues. CIAM is the practice of turning a consumer into a single digital identity that is uniquely recognisable across services, platforms, systems, and even (with the right cooperation) various businesses. While this may strike you as an approach more appropriate to retailers, I will show how the B2C use case applies just as well between healthcare organisations and their patients. We can even use it for physicians, nurses, lab technicians, and administrative employees in a business-to-employee (B2E) scenario, or for streamlined communication and workflow acceleration between providers and third parties such as pharmaceutical or insurance companies. Let us take a look at each in more detail.
B2C CIAM
In the B2C scenario, the business could be a provider, payer, or pharmacy and the customer could be a patient or their representative. B2C CIAM can facilitate single sign-on (SSO), multifactor authentication (MFA), and step-up authentication (where users are asked for more credentials when they request more sensitive information). SSO allows patients to access their healthcare information from anywhere, on the device of their choosing, while MFA and step-up authentication reassure patients that they are secure while doing so.
B2C CIAM also enables the delivery of portal services for members and patients as well as the omni-channel experiences today’s consumers prefer. And consent management comes as standard, allowing patients to give permission to share their data with different providers.
B2B CIAM
For seamless operations, healthcare organisations must be able to collaborate with others, such as pharmaceutical companies or insurance providers. CIAM delivers secure, compliant data-sharing and streamlines partner onboarding and offboarding. Role-based access ensures that every participating party receives access only to the data and applications they need for their function.
The integrated delivery network (IDN) or healthcare network – the ecosystem of sub-organisations like providers, accountable care organisations (ACOs), and healthcare facilities – can use a CIAM platform to authenticate patients who move across facilities. Other common B2B scenarios for CIAM include third-party technology partners that provide solutions to healthcare organisations, which then provide them to others in the network.
B2E CIAM
Healthcare enterprises can use IAM to securely manage their workforce’s access to internal applications and data. As with other scenarios, a role-appropriate level of access is granted to each employee. MFA and SSO can ensure security and ease of use, ensuring physicians, their colleagues, and other authorised professionals can access critical systems when necessary. This can happen through smart cards, tokens, or mobile apps.
As with network partners, IAM can streamline onboarding and offboarding for all staff. It can improve security across the board and enhance regulatory compliance while boosting workforce productivity.
Let’s get personal
CIAM in healthcare is a natural fit for all the challenges faced in the transformative age. It is a critical component in delivering Patient 360, and also in the creation of the “digital patient double,” which is a data representation of a patient that allows healthcare businesses to manage digital sessions and personalise them.
In a world that is inescapably digital, everything we do is eligible for digitalisation. When applied to healthcare, through CIAM, this bodes well for the quality of care, the efficiency of workflows, and the overall patient experience.
Michael Bunyard is Vice President / Head of Marketing, at IAM
