By Randall Irwin, Advanced Security Architecture at Microsoft

Healthcare organizations face two fundamental challenges today: how to make healthcare easier for patients and how to help healthcare IT departments leverage the cloud so organizations can modernize legacy technology, keep up with ever-changing security threats and grow their businesses.

Patients have become overwhelmed by healthcare portals. Anyone who sees a general practitioner as well as specialists has to manage multiple portals with multiple passwords. Invariably, they will forget a password, which requires them to call a third-party help desk person who will guide them through the process – but it can take 10 minutes to reset the password when all the patient wanted to do was quickly look up a test result or pay a bill.

The vast majority of healthcare IT departments are still using legacy on-premises technology based on old standards and protocols. During the pandemic, demand for healthcare skyrocketed, so organizations are now servicing and managing more than double the patient load. They simply can’t scale, modernize and grow by buying on-premises equipment – it’s too expensive. They have to depend on the cloud.

Here are four ways healthcare organizations can use cloud technologies to make patient portals easier and more secure while growing their businesses:

• Leverage the cloud for economies of scale. The cloud was built for economies of scale. Instead of spending millions of dollars on legacy on-premises servers and databases, healthcare organizations looking to grow substantially over the next decade can buy all the compute storage and test environments they need in the cloud for a fraction of the cost.
• Enhance patient portals with IDentity-as-a-Service (IDaaS). Patients want a more streamlined, user-friendly patient portal experience. By using cloud-based IDaaS, patients can log in with one ID (or securely with Facebook account) and easily view their X-rays, check insurance information or pay medical bills.
• Enable the latest security technologies and protocols. As part of moving to IDaaS, healthcare IT departments can make use of security technologies built for the cloud that will make the portals easier for patients to use – and more secure. By using IDaaS, IT departments can roll out technology that includes multifactor authentication for more secure patient logins and adaptive authentication, automatically blocking hackers but allowing patients to securely access their records. Many healthcare organizations do not have cyber defenses robust enough to handle this level of service.
• Run analytics on healthcare data to gain business insights. While enhanced data management in the cloud offers value to all healthcare organizations, what’s even more valuable are the security insights and business intelligence that organizations can gain through analyzing the data. Analytics can tell the organization about user demographics and behavior – as well as whether they are authorized to access the portal. It can also detect misconfigurations and tell the IT team exactly what type of misconfigurations are prevalent. This kind of “actionable” data has become invaluable to healthcare organizations.

For healthcare organizations, making life easier for both patients and staff is a critical goal. At a time when hospitals are flooded with COVID-19 patients while patients with other ailments are kept waiting in hospital emergency rooms, it’s more important than ever for healthcare organizations to embrace new cloud technologies. It’s the best way to manage increased patient caseload, improve patient experience and gain critical insights into the patients and the traffic running through the network. While it can often seem overwhelming, hospitals and other medical facilities that partner with a solid cloud provider can migrate to the cloud and meet many of these technology challenges head-on – and do it in a way that makes the systems both easier to use and more secure.

To learn more about Microsoft Security, visit https://aka.ms/SecureHealth.