Envision Healthcare

Mike Hagan:  I'm Mike Hagan. I'm the Chief Information Officer for Envision Health Care. We run three market segments: American Medical Response, which is an ambulance company, largest ambulance company in the United States; EmCare, our physicians services business which provides emergency department physicians, hospitalists, radiologists, anesthesiologists across about 800 different hospitals. And then our Evolution Health business, which is our post-acute care.

So today, cloud is part of our strategy. We look at every application that's out there, and we typically look for cloud-based applications first. We have a very mobile population of employees. They're accessing applications in many different hospitals across the nation or in the ambulances, and so the cloud really enables that capability much faster and assuming more secure than what we could do if we were to try and do that all ourselves.

When we think about cloud, we think about security first, and what data's being put there. As employees move, ebb and flow between the company, as we merge and acquire companies, identity is a huge factor. We decided to do a little bit of a bake-off when we made a choice of going with Okta, and we piloted Okta against Microsoft and we had Okta up and running in the test environment, I think, in less than a week.

So we recently deployed an application, patient care reporting system. So, with Okta, we've been able to automate the provisioning process, so we're able to provision that user in Okta. But more importantly, we're able to then provide reporting back to that particular hospital that they can then use to de-provision their own users. So, they've taken on that responsibility and taken away the burden from us, but the whole process makes it seamless with Okta.

We have aunique approach where we are authenticating them into Office 365, the sharepoint portal using Okta, and then we use the API security to then get access to success factors, their scheduling information, their payroll information, and other internal systems without them having to re-authenticate or put in any sort of user ID and password in again.

When we deployed Okta, we didn't add any resources. We took our active directory experts and converted them into Okta experts, and so they're working very closely hand in hand with the Okta engineers to help us get through the deployment. It's been very successful in being able to provide that two-factor authentication into some of the applications that we wanted to.

You know, if you want a cloud-based identity management system that's easy to use and easy to implement, you would go to Okta.