Are you facing challenges while managing identities on EPIC Systems in your organization? Typically, when an establishment relies too much on an application – strategic foresight in terms of aligning the application with business requirements needs to be just on the spot. Many healthcare establishments rely on EPIC Systems for the management of patient data, however the processes are loose. It is important for EPIC System Management teams to answer a few questions, such as:

• When a user joins your organization – what is the EPIC User creation process?
• Do new clinicians get day-one access to EPIC System to perform their roles? If yes, is provisioning of clinicians on EPIC System manual or automated?
• How do you assign templates to users in EPIC?
• When an employee leaves your organization, what is the process to remove them from the EPIC System?
• If you receive a password reset request – what is the process? How many requests do you receive in a month?

Based on dependence on EPIC Systems, its management for system administrators can get challenging – in terms of provisioning users, assigning templates and extending quick access to providers. Also, there are strategic ground work which needs to be looked at clearly, such as defining rights and privileges of users. It can get frustrating for system administrators and impacts the way healthcare setup or a hospital functions. Communication between an EPIC System and Identity and Access Management (IAM) System can be of help in equipping System Administrators put forth best practices in the management of EPIC Systems.

Manual tasks done for running EPIC Systems are not necessarily strategic in nature, but redundant effort put in to make the system appear automated. Integration of EPIC System with IAM Platform also enables real-time, bi-directional identity synchronization between EPIC and Identity Management Infrastructure or External Applications. The cost of manual management of EPIC System – repeated intervention and costly manhours also goes down. As per experts estimate, an IT team of 5 resources for EPIC management spends about $500K annually only on Human resources in making the system run smoothly. Furthermore, the loss in terms of productivity and workflow inefficiency is not accounted for. Establishing a connection between EPIC Systems and IAM platform tasks down manual intervention, brings cost benefits and ensures system efficiency.

Through IAM Integration, the EPIC Systems Management can be streamlines by process alignment such as:

• User creation process for EPIC system can be synchronized with user on-boarding on IAM Systems, taking away effort, time and complexities
• IAM can support administrators’ manual tasks usually such as EMP user lifecycle management, template assignment, authentication, password management and management of EPIC attributes
• Connection between EPIC System and IAM Platform supports all features facilitated by EPIC-API

Also aligning the EMR System with IAM shields the Healthcare IT System against any unauthorized access – by dormant or deprovisioned users. It also brings greater controls in terms of understanding how often do you audit for deprovisioned users? Does your audit account for accesses made by users who were supposedly dormant?