Can an identity management solution save lives?

Can an identity management solution save lives?

Managing double entries in hospital information / medical systems

In the field of Identity Management we are usually concerned with the management of employees and their user accounts, access rights and authorizations. Sometimes it occurs that the same principles and tools that we use in identity and Access management projects can be applied to a wider range of situations not usually associated with identity management. Here’s a recent example:

A hospital has to be very secure about the management of access rights for its employees, but also when it comes to the patient data within their applications. Recently when meeting with IT management of a big hospital the question was asked whether we could also prevent double entries of ‘patients’ in Hospital Information Systems (HIS) like Meditech, McKesson, Epic, CPSI, Sage Health, EClinical Works, Allscripts and Eclipsys.

Imagine a patient existing two times in the hospital information system due to a typo or other mistake. That means the patient has two files containing different information. The doctors may then miss important information if they don’t access the right patient file. Imagine a patient that is allergic to penicillin being given a penicillin treatment just because of a typo in the HIS.

Using the same mechanisms and tooling used by identity management solutions in this case Tools4ever’s UMRA, and applying UMRA’s capacity to detect doubles or possible double entries in various systems, can save lives. And with the different kinds of matching mechanisms in UMRA this is quite easy to do - a possible double can then be detected very early and a notification be sent to the person managing that particular data to validate whether or not we are really talking about the same patient. UMRA can of course also manage all the tracking and tracing required regarding the alerts and the way they have been dealt with.

To learn more about Tools4ever solutions, please visit our website,
Tools4ever, Inc.