The health sector faces a staggering array of challenges and consequences in the relentless battle against cyberthreats. Surprisingly, it’s not just a battle against malicious outsiders — within healthcare organizations internal users represent 39% of all threat actors.¹

Human error in the forms of data loss and misuse are the most common ways internal actors pose a threat to the healthcare organizations they work for. With the average cost of a breach at $10.93 million², it is essential to ensure that healthcare providers, employees, contractors, and partners only have access to the internal apps and systems that they need to do their jobs — and nothing more — to keep the risk of internal threats at bay.

Healthcare governance embodies the comprehensive framework and set of practices that digital health system stakeholders use to guide decision-making, implement initiatives, and manage its operations effectively and ethically. This governance structure ensures that the organization's actions align with its mission and values, such as prioritizing quality of care, patient and member safety, and regulatory compliance. Good governance within a healthcare context involves strategic leadership, clear organizational structures, effective risk management practices, and accountability to stakeholders, including regulatory bodies and the community at large.

Identity governance is deeply intertwined with healthcare governance for risk management. It refers to the policies and technologies that govern the digital identities of users within a digital health system, including healthcare providers, staff, partners, and consumers such as patients and members. By managing who has access to what information and systems, identity governance supports the healthcare governance model by ensuring that sensitive data, such as patient records, are protected against unauthorized access. Having a tight grasp on who has access to what and why is critical for maintaining healthcare data confidentiality, ensuring compliance with health data protection regulations, and supporting risk management efforts.

Implementing robust identity governance initiatives within a healthcare organization helps to safeguard against data breaches and cyber threats, which are increasingly common and can severely impact healthcare delivery such as patient care. Regular audits of identity and access management (IAM) practices are part of good governance, ensuring that measures are effective and comply with national health policies and regulations.

For years, healthcare organizations have relied on legacy identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions to manage user access, ensure compliance, and safeguard vital data. However, these traditional solutions fall short in the face of increasingly complex IT requirements, leading to operational inefficiencies and risk associated with workers and partners having more access to health system apps and resources than they should. This is often called over-provisioned access, or entitlement creep.

A typical digital health system has tens of millions of access privileges spread across legacy and modern applications within on-premises and cloud environments. Unfortunately, legacy IGA solutions don’t provide enterprise-wide visibility or the context needed for an informed decision-making process about access privileges. Instead, they operate in “identity silos” based on static data, such as assignments, roles, and entitlements. These silos leave decision-making stakeholders blind as to who has access to what and, more importantly, why they have access.

To solve this problem, healthcare leaders are implementing Ping Identity’s AI-powered identity governance and administration (IGA) solution to revolutionize their health system’s identity governance and administration. Ping’s Identity Governance solution can help you achieve a variety of risk management initiatives. These include the following.

1. Eliminate identity silos with contextual visibility across your entire digital health system

Unlike siloed, legacy IGA solutions, Ping’s AI-informed IGA solution collects and analyzes identity data from all data sources. It provides enterprise-wide visibility into all identities and their access rights, in addition to contextual insight into who has access to what and why.

2. Unmask access blind spots for informed decision-making and risk management

Access blind spots are common with legacy IGA solutions, a particular problem with disparate systems that don’t share data. Ping’s IGA solution increases your visibility of who has access to what by leveraging AI and ML to analyze all identity data and identify user access and entitlement risk organization-wide. It also identifies and highlights high-risk access and inappropriate access privileges for stakeholders such as compliance and audit teams.

3. Solve inappropriate user access to health systems with access rights identification

Most access requests and audits are managed through manual tasks. With Ping’s identity governance solution, you can say goodbye to manual rubber-stamping and bulk approvals that introduce risk to your health system. Our IGA solution uses AI and ML to automate the governance function and provide an analysis of all identity-related data. By analyzing the entire user access landscape, you can proactively rectify over-provisioned users and outliers, recommend remediation, and automate the removal of access rights when appropriate.

4. Identify inappropriate access privilege patterns with health system access insights organization-wide

Instead of manually analyzing who has access to what, you can use Ping’s IGA solution to automate insights for all user access patterns. And, by using machine learning (ML) to understand dynamic changes across your healthcare organization, you can predict and identify outliers, including inappropriate access privilege patterns and unauthorized user access. 

5. Eliminate manual user access approvals with automated approvals and remediation

Giving users access to apps and resources is typically a manual process. Ping’s identity governance solution eliminates manual approvals and remediation. With our AI-driven identity analytics approach, you can automate the approval of high-confidence, low-risk access requests and certifications, as well as the revocation and removal of stale user access rights. This automation reduces access request burdens and accelerates certification campaigns without exposing your healthcare organization to unnecessary risk.

The importance of identity governance within your overarching healthcare governance strategy cannot be overstated. It underpins the ability of healthcare leaders to make informed, strategic decisions that enhance the quality of care, ensure the efficient use of resources, and meet the needs and expectations of all stakeholders. Furthermore, governance models that include IGA contribute to the resilience and sustainability of healthcare organizations, enabling them to adapt to changing health landscapes and policy requirements. In short, healthcare governance, supported by strong identity governance practices, is essential for any health system committed to delivering high-quality, safe, and equitable healthcare services.

Capabilities That Ping Identity Governance Offers

Securing healthcare systems against internal threats and misuse is a significant undertaking. To learn more about how you can reduce risk by implementing modern identity governance and administration initiatives, contact us or read our white paper on AI-Driven Least Privileged Access.

¹https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/2022/healthcare-data-breaches/

²https://www.hipaajournal.com/2023-cost-healthcare-data-breach/