Success Story / Identity Unification for M&As

Healthcare System Streamlines Access and Speeds Time-to-Value

After a merger, a simplified identity system allowed them to focus on patient care.

Healthcare Giant Saves Millions Using Identity Unification

After the merger of two large hospital systems, the newly formed organization was left with a pair of siloed environments housing critical applications and systems. This created an urgent problem: the organization’s caregivers were unable to easily access the tools they needed to deliver quality patient care. To solve this pressing issue, the identity team needed to eliminate silos and enable seamless access across the new company. Costly workarounds or a complete system overhaul would cost tens of millions of dollars and result in serious operational inefficiencies and a huge increase in time-to-value.

The team reached out to Radiant Logic for a solution to unify all its identity data. With RadiantOne Intelligent Identity Data Platform, they quickly eliminated the challenge of multiple disparate stores across the two architectures. By presenting all the data in a single unified source, the team avoided unnecessary costs and greatly reduced post-merger time-to-value. This enabled the organization to deliver a seamless experience for caregivers, allowing them to focus on quality patient care.

The Challenge

Many inherited applications didn’t support multiple directories, leaving stakeholders with subpar access to critical systems. Delivering single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to grant simple, secure access required a better way forward than inefficient workarounds or a complete infrastructure overhaul—and they needed it ASAP.

The Outcome

The identity team discovered a smarter path, using Radiant Logic’s identity unification platform. With RadiantOne, the identity team quickly solved complex identity silo challenges, delivering seamless access through one set of credentials, improving operational efficiency, and avoiding a costly, time-consuming overhaul of their identity infrastructure.

The Impact

With RadiantOne, the team was able to extend crucial access to critical applications for their healthcare providers to critical applications within three weeks, saving precious time and tens of millions of dollars in unnecessary infrastructure changes. Now the company runs nearly all of its identity authentication infrastructure through the RadiantOne Platform.

“The $100 million that it would have cost was just CAPEX. We would have had to double the servers and hire more people, too. Radiant Logic was the only practical option.” 

—Security Architect at one of Fortune Magazine’s Top 100 Health Systems

Without identity unification, technical roadblocks would cost tens of millions to fix

Synergistically speaking, the merger of two Texas-based healthcare systems was a success. Their cultures and values aligned well and they were ready to move forward together, seamlessly blending upwards of 48 hospitals, 900+ patient care sites, 6,000 affiliated physicians, and 40,000+ employees. The organization was eager to act fast and get to the business of quality patient care.

On the technical side, however, the merger presented many challenges, which left the organization facing inefficient and costly workarounds when attempting to integrate two very different identity data systems:

  • Caregivers lacked central access across both patient records systems
  • The organization had not yet established secure MFA practices
  • Worst of all, critical applications didn’t support multiple directories

This technical roadblock threatened the success of the merger, nearly defeating the purpose of combining forces.

Proposed workarounds would have increased costs by tens of millions of dollars. Rebuilding everything through redeployment, duplication, or merging of data would take multiple years and thousands of hours of labor. Working with limited resources post-merger, the IT team needed a new solution—fast.

Choosing an Identity Data Fabric to Unify Identity Data

That’s where Radiant Logic stepped in, partnering with the newly merged company to build an Identity Data Fabric using RadiantOne Intelligent Identity Data Platform. This platform seamlessly connects disparate systems, building a comprehensive list of all users and global profiles for each user.

From Deployed to Done in Only Three Weeks

The RadiantOne Intelligent Identity Platform supercharged the organization’s post-merger integration project, taking only three weeks from deployment to active use, for an incredible M&A integration time-to-value turnaround. The identity team unified multiple identity stores for applications that previously weren’t compatible or flexible enough to change.

The new, single thread of identity data enabled a single login across the merged entities, quickly realizing the business value of the merger. The health group’s doctors and other providers are now able to access the daily applications they need without hassle, so they could focus on delivering high-quality patient care across the organization.

The deciding factor was RadiantOne’s ability to take multiple identity stores from two vastly different organizational architectures and present them as one single source. Since deployment, the team has been impressed with RadiantOne’s fast implementation time, reliability, cost savings, and all-around ease of use and management. It also eliminated the need to hire additional staff and continues to free up existing resources.

“We use Radiant Logic for 95% of our LDAP traffic. We have multiple clusters—about 20 servers spread throughout three data centers. RadiantOne just works. We don’t have to have dedicated people to run those 20 servers.”

—Security Architect for the merged healthcare giant

At the start of this project, the company was able to integrate 30-40 critical applications within a few weeks. Having proven itself in terms of usability, reliability, scalability, and performance, RadiantOne is now the foundation for authenticating users across 700+ applications, which is almost their entire identity authentication infrastructure.

RadiantOne not only solved the merged organization’s immediate M&A challenges, it also enabled several long-term strategic goals:

  • Establishing a Zero Trust framework
  • Enhancing user experience by eliminating the need for multiple credentials一and stopping “credential creep” in its tracks
  • Improving system efficiency, while greatly simplifying operations
  • Increasing security and extending MFA and SSO

 

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