CASE STUDY

FastMed Uses Centrify for Password Management

By Special Guest
, Chris Webber, Director of Product Marketing at Centrify
  |  January 12, 2016

Health care companies work with an unusually large number of web-based resources, including insurance providers, supply managers, and extended patient service providers. In addition, new apps aimed at improving both patient care and hospital processes are introduced every day.

That said, FastMed – which has community medical clinics at more than 85 locations throughout Arizona and North Carolina where it offers urgent, family and occupational medical care – is always looking for ways to leverage technology to improve patient care and make it easier for staff to work with the virtually endless number of databases, websites and apps that workers access multiple times each day.

“Our team was accessing so much information from so many different resources, they were drowning in usernames and passwords,” said Wayne Dale, application security engineer at FastMed Urgent Care. “And they were storing those passwords in the usual places — on sticky notes stuck to monitors, in Word files, and in their heads. We needed a solution to simplify and secure access to those resources and the information within them.”

Specifically, FastMed was seeking an identity as a service solution that would allow it to

provide easy, single sign-on access to the resources the medical and administrative staff required; adhere to HIPAA standards for restricting access to patient information; and minimize the numerous password resets the six-person IT team was receiving every month. After looking at a handful of vendors, FastMed selected Centrify Identity Service based on its ability to integrate cloud apps and web logins with Active Directory – which automatically solved all three items on FastMed IT’s list.

“We also really wanted to take advantage of Centrify’s ability to store a single login for each resource, which can be securely shared without individual users knowing or having access to the root password,” said Dale.

After testing, the team prepared for rollout by importing the apps, sites, and cloud services used across the organization. Dropping apps into the system was a very simple process; within minutes they appeared on user dashboards. Full deployment of the Centrify solution across the entire organization took less than two weeks.

“Because of our limited IT team, we opted to use Centrify Professional Services to customize the few apps that required it, and with each app, they responded with a finished product within in a day or two. It really helped to streamline the process,” said Dale.

Today FastMed has more than 1,000 users accessing more than 200 apps, websites, and cloud services – virtually every resource required across the organization – all with single sign-on via AD credentials.

Centrify has simplified the activities of the administrative staff with easy, one-click access, and eliminated the complexity and hassle of multiple usernames and passwords. The solution has made patient information more secure and helped to ensure HIPAA compliance while also providing clinical staff members a tool that manages the headaches of passwords and lets them focus on quality patient care. IT staff has benefited as well: Onboarding new employees has been dramatically simplified, since IT can manage credentials and automatically provision new accounts easily, for day-one access to all their apps, sites, and services.

“We estimate that an average help desk call costs $15 to $30. Eliminating a couple of hundred calls a month saves us thousands of dollars every year,” said Dale. “We’ve definitely seen a return on investment.”

This year, the Centrify technology will be made mandatory for all employees. And because of the rapid growth in the use of BYOD and corporate-owned devices like iPads, FastMed is planning to extend Centrify’s Mobile Device Management technology to specific mobile devices.

“With Centrify, implementation, configuration and ongoing administration is easy and that keeps operational costs low,” Dale said. “We want to extend that to mobile devices.”

Chris Webber is director of product marketing at Centrify (www.centrify.com).




Edited by Stefania Viscusi