Beyond the Device with 3Eye Technologies
Beyond the Device with 3Eye Technologies
Beyond The Device: Identity Automation in Healthcare
In this podcast episode of "Beyond The Device," Reid Estreicher of 3Eye Technologies interviews Mike O'Marra from Identity Automation. They discuss the significant role Identity Automation plays in the healthcare sector by providing solutions that streamline access to various systems and applications.
O'Marra, with almost two decades of experience in healthcare technology, outlines how Identity Automation's products, Exact Access (XA) and Quick Access (QA), have evolved to meet the industry's changing needs. The XA was developed to provide clinical enterprise workflow solutions, easing access to hundreds, if not thousands, of applications, while the QA, a more lightweight RFID badge tap solution, was created to assist in quick and secure login to one resource, such as a local Windows session or virtual desktops.
Estreicher and O'Marra further discuss the wide-ranging benefits of these solutions for various stakeholders, including clinicians, IT staff, and hospital management. For clinicians, the solutions help save time, enhancing their interaction with patients and their overall work satisfaction. For IT staff, the solutions ensure effective system access and compliance with audit requirements. Hospital management can see measurable improvements in efficiency and finance.
The conversation also sheds light on how Identity Automation long-term customer, Colorado Health showing the effectiveness of the XA and QA Identity and Access Management solutions for healthcare.
Take the last sip of the old coffee, and three two one we are live. And by live, I mean, we're prerecording this. In case we make any mistakes. We'll edit it down and fix it before we publish it. Thank you so much for tuning in for another episode of Beyond The Device. I'm joined today with the fantastic Michael Merra. From the one and only Identity Automation. Why are we here? We're gonna talk about it in just a second. I think they got a pretty great product set specifically in the healthcare world today. We're gonna be talking about. Mike, I know who you are, the people listening or watching might not. So before we get any further ado, I'm gonna turn it over to you for an intro, and then we're gonna get started. So, Mr. O'Mara, who are you and what do you do for IA?
Mike O'Marra:Hey, Reed. Thanks for having me. My name is Mike O'Mara, as we've covered and for Identity Automation, I manage our healthcare sales program. So I've been with the company since 2007, so coming up on sixteen years here this summer. And prior to that, was in the biometric space for eight years. Really kinda trying to pioneer fingerprint authentication, some iris work, and then as that permeated into health care in a couple different facets. I started linking up with the folks at health cast who were doing single sign on specifically for health care kind of fell in love with the use case and scenarios and and how we can help health care in general. So I came over here and I've been here ever since.
Reid Estreicher:Awesome. So you are brand new to the industry. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You've been yeah. You've been here for you've been here for hot minute, man. This is great. Thank you again for taking the time to do this. We definitely wanna have more people like yourself on to talk about solutions and healthcare specifically around identity management. I think Identity Automation for a lot of the work we've been doing at 3Eye, most people know you guys within the education space, but we're talking specifically healthcare flavor today. That's our genre, if you will, the vertical. We're gonna be talking about two different things, XA and QA. But I think maybe to go even one step back, people might not be aware of your background in healthcare, but you guys have had a long standing background in healthcare. We're actually gonna talk about one of the university, Colorado Health later on. But can you give us a little bit of background about Adentity automation in the health care space because you guys are not new to this.
Mike O'Marra:Not at all. You're right. And I think there might be some confusion out in the market relative to the name Health Cast. Right? So Health Cast was acquired by Identity Automation back in 2011, and so we are still subsidiary legal entity within Identity Automation who have really never lost our our mantra of of serving the needs of healthcare. So Healthcast company where I came from was back in nineteen ninety six started up by basically a techno nerd and a physician who was one was very frustrated with how they had to access their systems within the hospital to do their job. And the nerds said, hey, we can put some technology towards this and create a clinical single sign on for you, and that's kinda how the company got was born And so over the years, we've kinda developed really a way to make the clinicians efficient to make the IT staff more comfortable with how everybody's accessing the systems, etcetera, etcetera. So coming up on twenty plus years of the market, we really did pioneer the tap and go with the proximity base log on at the request of one of our customers who's been with us for twenty three years and counting now. So back in two thousand, they had come to us with a problem of, hey, we have these prox cards. They're awesome. We get into doors with them. We can get into the cafeteria and eat with them. Would it be would be really cool if we can log in with them. So we kinda took that with a partner, RF Ideas out there who I'm sure you're familiar with. Yeah. Got some API, did some dev work, and at the year, maybe 1999-2000, had them fully authenticating into a roaming desktop followed them around all day, which in the year 2000 was pretty -- Nice. -- Star Trek pioneer stuff.
Reid Estreicher:Very cool. Very cool. That's awesome. Yeah. That sorry. I mean, I didn't mean to cut you out. It's very, like, futuristic type of stuff. I think, you know, again, the couple things. One, having a customer that along clearly the mark of an unhappy customer(jk). So that's pretty pretty incredible for twenty plus years for you guys be with the same the same customer. And then also another thing, and something I really do love about you guys, you are actively listening to the market at all times. So if someone's saying like, hey, wouldn't this be great? You've done this with a couple other organizations in the health or assuming the education space. You've actually gone above and beyond specifically to do dev work for them to make, you know, what they ultimately is just a thought or a concept of bringing it to fruition to make it a reality. So, it's pretty freaking awesome, man. What specifically did it go back to XA and QA, you know, more specific nomenclature to Identity Automation in healthcare, what is XA and what is QA? Because these are, I think, two great solutions for anyone that is maybe frustrated in the healthcare space with the cost of some things or the difficulty of implementation. I think you guys have really designed well around both of those pain points.
Mike O'Marra:Well, thank you for that, Reed. Exact Access or XA was really the foundational product that we put forth back in 2000 or so. That's the clinical enterprise workflow solution set that does single sign on into, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of applications by now. And so that has been developed and improved upon for twenty plus years, and then speaking of of listening to customer feedback, and the market, maybe eight, nine years ago now as really the advent of virtual desktops came along. And active directory, LDAT type scenarios where the applications would open based on your user profile for Windows, we didn't really need to address all those applications. We further along those lines saw EMRs subsuming lots of other ancillary applications. And so that wasn't so much of an issue anymore. And so we were asked, hey, if we don't need the full blown single sign on and we don't need to integrate with a hundred apps. We just wanna get in and out of our virtual desktops or local Windows session, and from there, we can kind of accomplish our goals throughout the day, throughout our shifts, could we do something a little lighter weight? And that's where Quick Access or QA came to to to bear. So that is basically the proximity based authentication into one resource, whether that's your local window session, That's kinda all it does. We'll sign you in, we'll sign you out, we'll sign you over somebody if somebody committed a prior sin of leaving a session open and walking away, then next user comes up and taps, we'll close"Reid's" session and start logging in"Mike". So we can cover up for for that minor violation that you had committed. And also Again. It does well, yeah. Education is key. And so QA was also really good at getting in and out of virtual desktops very quickly. So it's a Windows and RDS session, Horizon View, that sort of thing. Zen desktop, If that's enough workflow for you and getting the proximity based app to switch users and authenticate in and secure your session, that's where quick access was designed to do very lightweight. We removed some of the back end horsepower needed to run it, so it's very fast, it's very inexpensive and services are kinda done in a couple of days as opposed to, you know, weeks or months with a full well enterprise platform.
Reid Estreicher:Awesome. Yeah. And I think that's again, it's like the the cost and the weight and of development of some of this. It's like Yeah. You know, I mean, you can technically if you have enough time and resources, you can you can develop and deploy anything. But in the real world, af far as, like, getting an actual solution in market, you really aren't afforded that. It's it's really a time and efficiency and and money. It's like that weird trifecta. It's like you can have two.
Mike O'Marra:Yeah. And there's nothing prohibiting you from starting with quick access to give them quote unquote enough workflow benefit, get them in and out of their system and then start adding the single sign on functionality on the back end down the road. So you can certainly, you know, take the crawl, walk, run approach.
Reid Estreicher:Yeah. And that's actually I think it's a a great point and something that I would love to see more organizations do, which is you know, the 1.0, 2.0, 3.0; like the the roadmap approach. I think a lot of times people get stuck in like this pilot purgatory because they're like, well, what what is it gonna be in five it's like sometimes you just kinda have to start building it in order to get it there. Not to say you just jump right in. You have to have a plan of where you're trying to go. Always begin with the end in mind. Right? But you gotta start somewhere. I think a lot of times they want everything. Some organizations get stuck and map everything out to the nth degree before they can actually you know, get something implemented and in the meantime, they continue to suffer all the other problems that they're having in the in the meantime. So definitely definitely food for thought great organization and a great person to reach out to, Mike O'Marra, if you're having those types of issues. I do wanna talk about the why. This is also very important. A lot of times, I think organizations in every industry, you're not just solving for one individual. Right? So it's like you have doctors and nurses, you have IT, you've got HR. You've got your you've got your C-level. You have shareholders. There's a lot of people to take into consideration. I think sometimes tech doesn't get rolled out because they might be solving for the IT department, but they just left off the finance department and they're not happy, or you're trying to solve something for the finance, the IT department, but the user is like, hey, this isn't doing this isn't, you know, scratching the itch. So can you talk a little bit about the the design of how you guys went to market with this? Because I think, again, going back to the intelligent design piece of the comment I made earlier, I think you guys really did see this from a encompassing solution for all personas as far as like who you're trying to solve for in this space.
Mike O'Marra:Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head read. There's several different constituents, you know, within the market that all view the product set, you know, differently. And so depending on who you're speaking with that that message can certainly change. So first and foremost, you know, this was made for connections, providers, doctors, nurses, so that they can, you know, effectively manage their day to day interactions with the patients. So clearly, if they're authenticating a hundred and twenty times a shift, give or take, and they have to sign in every time, and they have to sign in to seven applications. They're doing that while the patient is sitting behind them waiting to be seen. So first and foremost, we want to make their jobs easier. They can tap their badge, we'll sign them in. As soon as they tap their pads, they turn around and start interacting with the patients. So from that perspective, you know, their life gets better, their shifts get better, they will refer their patients to your hospital assuming that they have a place that they can comfortably practice medicine and treat patients and not mess with their workstation all day. So That's one, I think the second one, call it IT. You know, they want to make sure that the applications are being accessed efficiently, They've got compliance issues they need to deal with. They've got workflow issues. So they wanna make sure that the workflow is streamlined out there and that IT can handle the workload it doesn't come back to them as something additional they need to provide extensive care and feeding with. So our product set was designed to be pretty front loaded like you mentioned covering all those use cases up front, if you go that route, and then it's kinda set, forget it. I think at management level certainly the CFO. This is a very quantifiable ROI if you can save ten, twelve, fifteen minutes a day for a physician, you can easily map that to, hey, I can see two more patients a day that is a measurable improvement on the finances of the hospital or the system. So -- Yep. -- the compliance as well, hey, we know who access what systems where, when, and how, you know, that's a benefit for for auditing down the road and for compliance purposes. So a whole bunch of different constituents within the system that could all benefit in a slightly different way.
Reid Estreicher:Yeah. And he all the way down to, you know, H cap scores can get dinged if you're sooner around with logging into systems and you have less time with a with a patient and then all of a sudden they're coming back because you didn't get the proper care. That's gonna disproportionately in a negative way impact the hospital. And I'm actually, can you talk a little bit too about turnover in the hospital because I've I've been reading a ton about how hard it is to retain people. I think that's this is maybe dovetailing into that as well.
Mike O'Marra:Yeah. That that's a great point. There are certainly, you know, quantifiable benefits for retaining your high performing clinicians. And so it costs a lot of money to go out, attract, train, and then retain providers. So you wanna make sure that when they come to your hospital, your system, your clinic, what have you, that they can do their job in a satisfactory manner, so that they remain happy, remain with your system, and you don't need to go replace because that's an expensive proposition. So, yeah, clinician retention is a really big component of this.
Reid Estreicher:Yeah. And I know we we chatted a little bit about Colorado Health earlier and we basically, how this whole thing came to be as far as your initial work with them, and I just wanna highlight again just to go back to that. You know, having a customer on board for over twenty years, I think is something is really pretty amazing. Especially in the health care world where and anybody in the health care world is very well very well aware of this. It's a you know, it's dollars and cents and time. So the fact you've had the same organization with you guys for as long as you have and they've been happy is is really really saying something.
Mike O'Marra:Yeah. That that's wonderful to hear. Reid, it is it's a challenge. They're an excellent customer, a good group of of very competent and and driven individuals over there that maintain continuity for their providers, for their architecture, for their environment, etcetera. And we've been with them through originally, they were McKesson, with a whole suite of of different applications that didn't integrate all that well, which is kinda where we started our work and said, hey, we have this from McKesson suite that's got 15 different applications and they're all a little bit different. They don't really talk to each other. That's where we kinda came in to try to make that transition for the users a little bit easier. You know, in the interim 20+ years, you know, they've fully migrated over to Epic. So when you switch EMRs, that's a whole another can of worms that was, you know, a difficult proposition and and a long term one. And so, you know, work through that as well. And and we've done out with other folks as well, moving them from one EMR to another, which is a a pretty comprehensive change.
Reid Estreicher:Yeah. Absolutely, man. Again, like I said, you guys listen to your customer base and I think that speaks volume, especially in a world where everyone's trying to figure out where they can cut cost and be a little bit more lean. You get to a place where lean turns into anemia. Really not operation and not operating efficiently anymore. I think you guys are still really very very heavily focused on the support aspect of this industry, which is really crucial. So that that that was basically as we had a short one for you today, that I just wanna do a quick wrap up for you. You know, again, if you're just a quick overview because we've covered a ton. QA XA, if you're looking for that quick access, into into your systems, just that badge in and badge out for that Windows based environment, that's the way to go. If you're looking for the XA, which is the exact access you're looking for something like badging into Epic that I cover that properly?
Mike O'Marra:You did. Client side for us, it doesn't matter. And that's necessarily if it's Windows or even IGel, HP, Dell, WISE, a thin OS type of things, we can accommodate that. The quick access is a simple way to get in and out of one thing. If you want to get in and out of more things, including your EMR, that's where XA comes in. But basically, if you want to take your your photo ID, your RFID badge that you use to get into doors and apply that to your clinical workflow, give us a call.
Reid Estreicher:Awesome! The one and only, Mike O'Marra. Thank you so much for doing this, man. I really do appreciate it. Always a pleasure to talk to you, and thank you guys so much for checking this out watching or listening whichever medium that you are doing that on, be sure to check us out for another episode of Beyond The Device. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. Reach out to us at sales at 3eyetech.com. That's sales@3eyetech.com. Thank you guys so much again for joining us. We'll see you on the Internet. Cheers.