Adaxes for healthcare
Just being a healthcare organization is already testing the limits of Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID. The reason is simple. Stringent security and access control requirements create many questions that are hard to answer if you are unprepared.
For instance, can you pick a random employee account and claim with precision and confidence what permissions they have? Here's another. How can you ensure every staff member follows the appropriate guidelines for provisioning and updating user accounts?
The only way to reliably answer these questions is to have an organized, standardized, and at least partially automated environment. So, where should you begin?
Enforce data standards
Without enforcing data standards, any attempts to keep your directory in order will be in vain. If any potential change to a user account or a group is not regulated, it is almost guaranteed that someone will eventually make an error that will go unnoticed.
Adaxes can prevent these errors with the help of property patterns. They enable you to make any directory object property required, add format constraints to it, predefine property values, or turn fields into drop-down lists that eliminate freestyle input for good.
You might not see the immediate results of this simple change, but you will be confident that every future directory update complies with your policies. Sooner or later, you will find the time to bulk-update the rest of the objects and have a fully standardized environment.
Reinforce security and access control
Once you have sorted out standardization, you are on the right track. The next logical step is getting security and access control in check. We are talking about that sweet spot where access rights are granted on a strict need-to-have basis, yet everyone has uninterrupted access, which is vital in the healthcare industry.
The role-based access model used in Adaxes can help you do exactly that. You, undoubtedly, have many different types of users – medical staff, contractors, vendors, and other external entities. Having generic security roles that you assign to users based on their business role keeps access levels uniform and transparent and also encourages you to follow good security practices.
More importantly, all access control management is centralized. To understand what rights a user has and where these rights apply, you can simply look at their assigned roles and scopes. Digging down your directory and looking through the access control lists of every OU is not required.
Security role scopes can also be dynamic. If you are a multi-location clinic, you don't need to create several identical roles for every location – you can get by with just one. Every user assigned to the role will get permission to access objects from their location only.
This allows your support staff to handle all kinds of management issues locally and alleviates the risks from seasonal staffing and transfers. It also brings you a step closer to the principle of least privilege, as you don't need to remember to revoke permissions every time – Adaxes will automatically do it for you.
More about role-based access control
Take advantage of the web interface
The healthcare industry is notorious for having to house plenty of IT staff – to support the mix of legacy systems and modern applications and, of course, for redundancy. Some companies are not fortunate enough to afford it.
This is why the more Active Directory / Entra ID tasks you can safely delegate to your users, the better. Even if those users have no concept of what AD is, it won't be an issue. The web interface is customizable, meaning you can transform any seemingly complex task into a user-friendly series of button clicks with hints all over the place.
From managing conference room setup, mobile equipment, and vacation rule changes to requesting group membership and creating user accounts – the only thing these tasks lack to become simple is a clean and logical UI. Now you have it. And guess what? You have already ensured that all the standardization and permissions are under control.
With the help of custom commands and a bit of scripting, you can extend your reach beyond the directory. Custom commands enable you to build custom workflows that may contain PowerShell scripts. Then, you can present these workflows as clearly named and labeled buttons in the web interface.
With enough dedication, you can converge many routine tasks into a single point of control – Adaxes web interface. Here's a glimpse of what is possible: a workflow that updates a user account in Entra ID, their mailbox in Exchange, requests information from a clinical database, and uses this information to update your electronic health record system.
Of course, all this is possible if the third-party systems you employ have APIs. But, the fact that such a complex workflow can be launched from a web page with a couple of button clicks without requiring specialized knowledge is still worth considering.
Case studies
There are many other Adaxes features from which healthcare organizations can benefit. Automation – to free up IT resources and focus them on things that matter the most. Reports, that give you complete visibility over your environment at any point in time. Approval-based workflows that take all the risk out of delegation and make it a no-brainer.
Combine these features with ease of use, and you'll discover that you can manage your environment with half the effort and twice the efficiency.
See how Adaxes helps real-world hospitals and clinics:
