Success story
Complex identities, simplified
A university teaching centre governs tens of thousands of overlapping clinical and academic identities, and gets residents their access on the day their rotation starts.
- Tens of thousands
- identities managed at once: staff, physicians, patients, suppliers, researchers, students, trainees and residents
- Thousands
- doors and rooms under controlled physical access in the new hospital
The situation
The client is a major university teaching centre and one of its region’s leading healthcare institutions. It is made up of many hospitals, clinics and other entities, which is where the difficulty starts.
Several tens of thousands of identities have to be managed at once: employees, doctors, patients, suppliers, researchers, guests, students, trainees and residents.
The challenge
Interns and university residents are a large share of the population, and the most demanding part of it. Access has to be ready when a rotation begins and withdrawn promptly when it ends, which generated a very high volume of manual work, with the cost, delay and error rate that implies.
The centre also had a deadline. It was preparing to move into a new hospital where physical access to thousands of doors and rooms would be strictly controlled.
The objective
The first objective was to take the delay, the errors and the manual work out of the start of each session, when residents and interns have to be onboarded and offboarded in bulk.
The second was to see the identity population clearly: which accounts were genuinely in use, which no longer needed access, and how quickly the latter could be cleaned up. That question had a budget attached. Software licences were still being paid for users who no longer needed them, and recovering those licences helped finance the project itself.
What was built
RAC/M Identity was integrated with the centre’s multiple identity sources to give one synchronized repository, and with its self-service portal so managers and super-users could create identities and request access without going through IT.
It was also wired into the university resident process. The universities produce lists of incoming residents with their departments and rotation dates; from those lists, accounts and access are created automatically, then withdrawn and deactivated when the rotation ends.
The result
Identity management was simplified across a genuinely complex environment, and the synchronized repository cut software licensing costs enough to fund part of the deployment.
- Arrival and departure of trainees and residents is automated end to end.
- Physical access cards are issued and managed from the same system.
- Regulatory obligations for data security and confidentiality are easier to evidence.
- Manual identity work, and the delays and errors that came with it, are substantially reduced.