Local Health Unit 11 Empoli

Story Details

The Local Health Unit 11 Empoli, in Italy, provides a wide range of health services to local residents. Apart from hospital and outpatient care, the organization delivers rehabilitation and home support. As is true for many healthcare providers, IT solutions are often at the heart of these services, enabling medical professionals to make quicker decisions and to improve the welfare of the people in their care.

As its IT infrastructure evolved, the organization faced the challenge of managing access to applications and data efficiently. Identity management technology helps automate this process while keeping records of employee identities and network transactions. But, the problem for Local Health Unit 11 Empoli was that it lacked an identity management solution and control was largely manual.

Some 2,000 health workers used a Web-based infrastructure, which featured 15 applications and 13 levels of access. Employees had to provide a username and password for each application. And without an identity management system, IT staff had to register employees for each application separately, including their access levels. Not only was this time consuming, it sometimes resulted in errors. The existing system was good at safeguarding the patient information that was protected under law, but it could not be relied on to deliver rapid access to that data in emergency situations.

The organization started looking for a comprehensive solution that would include access provisioning, password management, identity synchronization, and auditing for compliance. While the solution had to meet the organization’s needs today, it also had to evolve with the unit over time.

After reviewing the market, executives chose Sun Identity Manager 7.0. The technology is part of a portfolio of Sun Identity Management solutions, providing secure access to multiple enterprise resources and extending identity management across many domains. Dr. Luisa Cattaneo, information systems, technologies, and networks manager at the Local Health Unit 11 Empoli, says, “We analyzed various solutions before arriving at Sun’s proposal, which provided the best technology for integrating the identity management and enterprise single sign-on.”

Local Health Unit 11 deployed Sun Identity Manager software and easily integrated the technology with Microsoft Active Directory, which delivers Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)-like directory services for the organization. Says Cattaneo, “We completed the work in four months — a very short time, considering the complexity of the task. Our Sun partner, Tech Gap Italia, showed a high level of expertise and ensured the implementation was well-executed.”

Now, when a manager or employee sends the IT team a request for access rights, Sun Identity Manager automatically forwards a request to the system administrator. If the demand is approved, the solution creates an account for the specified applications and sends account information to the end user. In addition, personnel can recover passwords and managers can deactivate user rights just as straightforwardly.

Sun Identity Manager has automated the process for assigning new passwords. This helps IT personnel focus on more valuable, work, which in turn helps increase IT productivity and reduce costs. The solution has also added a new layer of protection to sensitive data, while automation is making access quicker.