Within the purview of healthcare industry, EPIC is an important application support system. It creates software for medical groups, hospitals and integrated healthcare organizations, spanning across clinical, administration and revenue divisions. It supports functions related to patient care, including registration and scheduling, clinical systems for doctors, nurses, emergency personnel and other care providers, along with systems for lab technologists, pharmacists and radiologists and billing systems for insurers.
According to EPIC, hospitals that use its software are in possession of 54% of patients’ records in the US. Such a wide and extensive usage of EPIC applications makes it imperative to synchronize administrative It capabilities that support identity management and access governance. This is important for achieving better interaction and security amongst application end points and IAm capabilities.
Establishing a connection between EPIC Systems and IAM platform takes down manual intervention, brings cost benefits and ensures system efficiency. However, the question is how is the healthcare It system making efforts to shield against any access made via EPIC Systems? Also, how often do they audit for de-provisioned users or account for accesses made by users who were supposedly dormant?
IT administrators in healthcare organizations understand the work-loads that go in to management of EPIC Systems. Furthermore, getting EPIC Systems to interact with IAM solution is complicated. For a start, it needs to support simplified, real-time and robust interaction. Within EPIC’s scope of usage, a user must be provisioned in each domain using tools that interact with IAm capabilities. IAM-EPIC Application Integrator helps to improve the usability and adoption of Epic applications and integrating it with the exiting IAm platform. The connector focuses on strengthening It system by easing workflow through SSO capabilities, simplifying administration through centralized automation of user identity and ensuring right access.
Ideally Epic Systems connector must cater to all identity management functions to automate interaction between Epic Systems and any identity management platform, including home-grown systems. Quantification of benefits to business when IAM drives workflows of any application are hard to put together, however some broad benefits can be identified as follows:
Drastically reduced error prone manual efforts. IT system workflows need to enable secure, timely and accurate automation of provisioning process and tie them to existing enterprise provisioning systems in an automated way. The connectivity established through EPIC-IAm application integration must take care of this, and can be quantified in recoding reduced help desk intervention for access or password management related requests.
Reduced man hours naturally brings down administrative costs. Channelizing information from an authorized source, IAM platform in this case, decreases maintenance costs, constant auditing requirements and data security risk. The checks placed in the process arms the It teams to focus on strategic aspects.
As IAM and ePIc Systems interact with each other, duplication becomes a thing of past. Robust interaction with existing identity management systems does not need a constant watch. The integration facilitates provisioning/de-provisioning compatibility, tracks inactivate users’ record on all associated domains from a single source, no additional certification required, etc.
Experts suggest that integration between EPIC Systems and IAm platforms ought to bring specific set capabilities, including:
- Rapid Application Deployment: Collate all identities by enabling Active directory integration with Epic System through a simple and quick process.
- User Synchronization Intelligence: Bring together users’ data, create, upgrade and delete identities (users and/or devices), and eliminate login-related duplicate tasks by integrating with corporate credentials.
- Connected Application Integration: Achieve users’ access consistency based on entitlements–position, department and groups, access guidelines and healthcare industry regulations.
Functions performed by Enterprise Application Integrator as a trusted virtual administrator include lifecycle management, access assignment, authentication, management of passwords and attributes performed by EPIC. It adds value by eliminating complex and costly developments and extends the RoI of existing technology investments.
An example of functions performed by interaction between IAM and Epic Systems is when a user has been created by the IdM system, it is automatically reflected in the Epic Application system. Activation of an account on Epic Systems is conducted simultaneously. once a user is created on an IdM system, the user details automatically gets reflected in the Epic Application system. Thus, activation of an account on Epic Systems is conducted.
User’s specifications based information updates get passed on to Epic application system on real-time basis and identifies the items that are to be changed. Any changes in a user’s detail, including department, position, role-based evolution, are to be consistently reflected on all connected platforms and/or applications. This must also allow limiting the access of inactive users from Epic application web service to bring down chances of misuse of official information. When a user is out of the enterprise system, the application integrator deletes the account from the app. It also undertakes management of user passwords such as setting user or external passwords and forcing password change.
“Supported Functions of EPIC – IdM Provisioning Enterprise Application Connector”