While Chromebooks have long dominated in the education space, they are now making inroads into other industries as more organizations shift away from traditional desktop computers to portable and low-cost thin client devices.

More and more, healthcare as providers are merging together or acquiring other hospitals to increase their footprint, provide higher levels of patient care, and enable strategic synergies.

Modern identity and access management (IAM) solutions are a crucial, but often overlooked facilitator of IT integration. Having the right IAM solution in place not only reduces time, costs, and integration conflicts, but also ensures a smoother transition for both clinicians and patients.

Healthcare mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are happening more frequently than ever. In fact, 2017 was a banner year for M&As, with 115 transactions, including 10 deals between hospitals with a net revenue of over $1 billion—the highest number in recent history.

In busy hospital settings, clinicians move from room to room and department to department. They require multiple logins as they switch from one workstation to another and access multiple endpoint devices, such as thick and thin clients running Windows- or Linux-based operating systems.

Though many of us know that healthcare data is valuable, not all of us are aware of exactly how valuable it is. Electronic health records (EHRs) are a one-stop shop for all the data a hacker wants: medical, financial, and personal. Some data doesn’t age either—for example, your birth date and Social Security number never change.

In the healthcare industry, a lot of energy goes into driving practitioner efficiency and making patient data easier for clinicians to access. But is enough focus being put on security and protecting patient data?

News headlines indicate the answer is a resounding no. There have been a slew of notable healthcare breaches in recent years.

I am excited to share our latest press release announcing that Identity Automation has acquired, HealthCast Inc., a provider of award-winning enterprise single sign-on (eSSO) and virtual desktop technology for the healthcare industry.

Increased regulation and the shift from paper-based to digital records has created new challenges in securing and managing access to personal health data. On the one hand, shared workstations and the need for clinicians to have ready access to patient information and applications, regardless of location, has driven the widespread adoption of eSSO products that deliver streamlined, passwordless access.

The breaches of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center and the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have been hot topics in the last month. Hollywood Presbyterian because it’s so fresh in our minds and the OPM because of the fallout resulting from it, including House Oversight Committee hearings and the (forced) resignation of its CIO.