Building Seamless Patient Experiences

Executive Summary

Digital transformation has become a modern imperative in all industries, including healthcare. Today’s patients increasingly expect their healthcare providers to be tech-forward in assessing and addressing their needs.
One of the ways healthcare providers should look to do this is by creating a frictionless user experience. Just as patients have individual healthcare needs, they also require an intuitive experience that simplifies the access to the information and services they need. A system that is convenient to use and runs with as little downtime as possible can help keep patients satisfied—and healthy.

To further ensure customized treatment and services, healthcare providers have to collect data on their patients—and not everyone is open to sharing sensitive information. With data breaches and security incidents so prevalent in the media, many patients are reluctant to share their health data, which can impede meaningful engagement and personalized care.

Seizing control of identity offers a unique opportunity for healthcare providers to regain their patients’ trust. By crafting a forward-thinking identity strategy, they’re able to secure patient information, craft personally-targeted healthcare strategies, and deliver a superior experience.

Trust Is Paramount to Customer and Patient Experiences

Today, healthcare is evolving away from the typical fee-for-service model and becoming more focused on quality of care. As this shift takes place, clinics and primary care physicians are looking for ways to provide better services, while improving their margins as they shoulder more and more medical expenses. Digital channels present a unique opportunity 
to do this. Leaders in every industry are catching on to the importance of digital transformation, and when it comes to providing patient care, having the right solutions in place can make a life-saving difference.

While patients are eager to engage digitally, they increasingly exercise caution—and with good reason. Data breaches are everywhere, and it’s no secret that identity and access issues are usually the root cause.

• 81% of breaches involve stolen or weak credentials

• 91% of attacks target credentials

• 73% of passwords are duplicates

A number of security issues arise from credential harvesting. Contextual information gained can increase exposure to social engineering and malware attacks. It also increases the risk of personally identifiable information being compromised. Healthcare providers therefore face a number of challenges:

• Information in the healthcare industry is already fragmented, due to the fact that many providers are operating their own systems, applications, and databases. This means that when they need to share patient data, they require an entirely new set of credentials, which is inefficient and is inefficient and takes a toll on healthcare providers—along with people they’re trying to care for.

• Healthcare providers reusing passwords. With so many new users, apps, and profiles to keep track of, medical providers need better tools to manage the user lifecycle for both partners and patients. When medical providers reuse passwords, they increase the likelihood of a breach and put sensitive data at risk. They also risk defying regulations such as the health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA).

• Patients are more digitally fluent than ever, and therefore more aware of potential security threats. They recognize these risks are inherent to digital services—and they may lack confidence in their healthcare provider’s ability to properly safeguard their information. When confidence is low, it leads to a number of issues that impede healthcare initiatives.

Frictionless user experiences go a long way towards building patients’ confidence in their healthcare provider. When patients know to expect a unified, personalized, and seamless user experience, they are more likely to engage across a number of platforms and channels, encouraging healthcare providers to further customize and digitize their services. Patients, however, are not the only users of healthcare systems—employees themselves can benefit from a frictionless user experience, as increased ease of use allows them to efficiently access the vital information they need.

The Vicious Cycle of Mistrust, Faulty Data and Poor Experience

Ultimately, trust issues lead to real impacts on the quality of healthcare. Without accurate patient data and a clear picture of medical needs, history, and preferences, the effectiveness of patient care and service are crippled. This can lead to serious ramifications for the industry, which is dependant on having accurate data and records from every stakeholder across the healthcare ecosystem.
Without trust, there is no data, and without data, there is little patient value. When healthcare providers fail to deliver value, patients are even less likely to trust them, and many medical organizations get trapped in a vicious cycle. 

Identity: The Foundation of Secure, Seamless Customer Experience

The good news is that while mistrust creates a vicious cycle, trust creates a virtuous cycle. Patients that trust their healthcare providers will engage more, which allows caregivers to deliver more value, which in turn makes patients even more willing to engage.

The key to restoring that trust is to excel at understanding, managing, and securing patient identity. A strong identity management strategy allows healthcare organizations to:

• Secure customer information. A modern, coordinated identity management strategy helps to drastically mitigate many of the credential harvesting vulnerabilities discussed earlier. Patients that feel secure are more likely to engage.

• Increase marketing effectiveness. As customers engage more with a care provider, identity management helps create a rich, cross-platform view of patient preferences. It helps medical organizations deliver highly-tailored advice and treatment, resulting in a more effective recovery for the patient and continued loyalty to the care provider.

• Deliver seamless, personalized experiences. A highly-coordinated identity strategy helps healthcare organizations build better patient experiences across product and service lines. Okta API Products deliver an out-of-box, market-leading global identity layer and standards-based authorization that unifies access and experiences across applications and engagement points with the patient.

Why Okta?

Okta’s approach to identity and access management is uniquely positioned to help healthcare providers take control across these three pillars of value.

Securing patient information

• Secure personally identifiable information in a modern, hardened cloud service with best-in-class security controls designed and built in.

• Unify your patient identity infrastructure into a single service. This reduces silos, which create room for error and needless complexity—the enemy of security.

• Deliver secure sign-in with powerful options for single sign-on and multi-factor authentication. It is unrealistic for patients to remember several strong passwords. Okta takes human error out of the picture.

• Manage complex authorization across users, apps and APIs, allowing you to reduce the possibility of cross-site attacks and increasing the value delivered through unified experiences.

• Ensure that all your methods of collecting, using, sharing, and storing data are in accordance with industry regulations. Okta’s convenient HIPAA Compliant cell is designed specifically for service providers to make sure they meet all the requirements.

Increase effectiveness of care

• Build a single view of your patients to understand how to meet their needs. Learn about access patterns, preferences, usage trends, and other metrics.

• Provide personalized experiences, whether online or in the doctor’s office, by harnessing patient data to offer services that are in line with their health needs and individual preferences.

• Integrate to the analytics solutions you already use, creating a far richer understanding of patterns and reducing the complexity of getting personalized programs and services up and running.

• Drive long-term patient relationships and loyalty, which leads to repeat business, referrals, other opportunities down the road.

Deliver a frictionless user experience

• Out-of-box, market-leading global identity layer and standards-based authorization that unifies access and experiences across applications and engagement points with the patient.

• Easily manage account provisioning and automate lifecycles with your healthcare processes, giving you end-to-end control over your patients’ customer experience.

We are Here to Help

Okta provides an end-to-end suite for modern identity management. We connect with complex service infrastructures, enrich context by providing threat intelligence to deploy single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and automate lifecycle management. We do all of that by working with your existing security infrastructure to provide value.