How Okta and AWS are securing trust in healthcare

Trust has always been at the heart of healthcare. We entrust our most personal and sensitive information to healthcare providers throughout our lives. In return, we expect these organizations to take good care of it, use it wisely, and allow us to access it whenever we want. After all, it is our data.

And there's a lot of it: A staggering 30% of all the world's datais generated by the healthcare sector. Unfortunately, patients and clinicians aren't the only ones interested in this data. In 2023 there were 725 large-scale healthcare data breaches, with incidents now costing an average of $9.77 million. Such events not only cost providers monetarily in compliance fines and fixes, they also badly compromise patient trust.

But trust involves more than just security. For consumers, trust also hinges on the seamlessness of the experience organizations deliver. For organizations, delivering a secure and frictionless experience at an affordable price is key. This is why healthcare providers are turning to cloud services like AWS to provide secure infrastructure, drive down costs, and fuel innovation.

To truly unlock the potential of the cloud, managing access to users' sensitive data is critical. Unfortunately, many healthcare providers' legacy Identity systems simply can't keep up. Disparate information systems and authorization processes are creating a fragmented, frustrating user experience that also contributes to major security vulnerabilities. This is exacerbated by the volume of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and joint ventures in the healthcare sector, with every new union or collaboration potentially involving complex integrations that slow productivity. Meanwhile, regulatory systems such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are tightening requirements on protecting patient information, with steep penalties for violations.

To fully realize the cloud's benefits, providers are turning to a modern, unified Identity solution like Okta, enabling them to balance strong Identity security with frictionless user experiences. Okta's Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Cloud work hand-in-hand with AWS's secure cloud infrastructure to safeguard access to patient data, connect systems seamlessly, and improve experiences for patients and healthcare employees alike.

Let's look at how Identity solves the most pressing challenges facing healthcare providers:

Unifying IT systems

Digital healthcare is a puzzle of many pieces, including patient portals, payment portals, Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), and more. When these systems aren't connected, the result is disjointed user journeys and poor credential hygiene, creating vulnerabilities that bad actors can exploit. Unifying these systems under one Identity provider enhances security and simplifies access, improving usability for patients and clinicians.

Protecting against breaches

Effective protection against breaches requires multiple layers of security. Okta's Universal Directory serves as a single source of truth, enabling consistent enforcement of security policies across your technology stack. Features like multifactor authentication (MFA) and Single Sign-On (SSO) strengthen security without compromising the user's experience. Lifecycle Management ensures access is continually aligned with users' roles, automatically adjusting permissions as employees join, leave, and move organizations. Meanwhile, passwordless authentication provides an advanced, user-friendly alternative that eliminates the inherent vulnerabilities of traditional passwords.

Navigating M&A complications

Healthcare is a hive of activity, with a constant stream of joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions reshaping medical technology and service delivery. Yet the time to realize value from these transformations is significantly slower when IT systems are disconnected and employees are hindered as they navigate for crucial information. With a unified Identity platform, organizations can seamlessly integrate disparate systems, streamline access for employees, and quickly start leveraging the benefits of new entities and ventures.

Meeting compliance requirements

Failing to comply with regulatory systems such as HIPAA can hurt healthcare organizations' bottom lines in more ways than one. In addition to hefty fines, data breaches inflict serious reputational damage and may easily drive patients elsewhere: 76% of patients will tell others about a negative experiencewith their healthcare provider, while 43% would refuse to return to a providerthat disappointed them in the past. Okta's platform meets the world's most rigorous compliance requirements, including HIPAA, and has also achieved a FedRAMP Moderate ATO.

Delivering value into the future

Together, Okta and AWS offer security, flexibility, and a smooth user experience for everyone in healthcare - from the patients accessing services to the clinicians providing their expertise and the organizations employing them. By embracing a unified approach to Identity in the AWS cloud, healthcare providers gain the best of both worlds: frictionless experiences for patients and employees and robust, multi-layered security that builds long-lasting trust.

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