< + > Okta Does Identity and Onboarding at Home and in the Clinical Setting

It’s widely understood that passwords for access to digital resources are both insecure and annoying for the users. Sandeep Kumbhat, Field Chief Technology Officer at Okta, points out that digital cards, widely used in health care systems, also have their difficulties: they must be securely distributed, and a constant stream of outside visitors has to be accommodated.

Modern identity systems must support a wide range of devices and accommodate telehealth, which means the patient should be onboarded without having to come into the clinical office. The identity system should also support different experience for different types of patients, such older or younger people with differing expectations.

Okta handles identity and security through facial recognition. Even consumer mobile devices can do this securely, allowing patients to set up accounts at home. The patient might use a driver’s license at the start to prove their identity, but can then move from one service to another without logging in again.

Kumbhat points out that single sign-on is especially hard to implement in the current health care environment, where mergers and acquisitions lead to multiple identity systems within the same organization. The experience should nevertheless be unified so that the clinicians’ and patients’ experiences are seamless. A diversity of identity systems, loosely tied together, also creates more opportunities for cyberattacks, which are growing rapidly.

Okta is currently integrated with a number of EHRs including Epic, allowing automatic onboarding, offboarding, and role changes for both staff and patients.  Plus, it ties into your HR system to automatically deprovision accounts when staff leave as well.  That fills a massive security hole for many healthcare organizations.

Kumbhat talks a bit about future directions, which include protecting a session against user mistakes or other types of compromises, and making it easy for the patient to come back.  Check out our video interview with Sandeep Kumbhat from Okta to learn more (And be sure to check out our previous interview at Okta’s Oktane conference that talks about Call Verification in healthcare).

Learn more about Okta: https://www.okta.com/

Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.

And for an exclusive look at our top stories, subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube.

Tell us what you think. Contact us here or on Twitter at @hcitoday. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, check out our various advertising packages and request our Media Kit.