Gwinnett Medical Center saves over $1.1 million and 73,845 administrative hours with Avatier

Gwinnett Medical Center is a not-for-profit health care network in Atlanta that provides services to more than 400,000 patients. Hospitals and support facilities in the network employ approximately 5,000 internal staff and about 800 affiliated community physicians. The Gwinnett IT staff needs to make sure patient information is readily accessible to doctors, nurses and health care professionals, whether working onsite or remotely. “We selected Avatier’s password management solution, Password Station, in September 2005,” said Rick Allen, vice president of Information Security, Gwinnett. “At the time, requests for Active Directory password resets were overwhelming our help desk.” Allen points to Avatier’s reporting module to support his claim of efficiency using Password Station. Over the past seven years, he says he saved more than $1.1 million, with a reduction of 73,845 administrative hours. Gwinnett also purchased a connector pack from Avatier to connect its Lawson ERP system to physician request systems from McKesson HCI and HPF and Sunquest; and synchronized passwords through the Active Directory. Now, when a user changes a password to view information, it also automatically changes his password to place orders. At this time Gwinnett also needed to address its home grown identity and access management solution.

With more than 500 new hires a year, plus a 10 percent annual turnover rate, Gwinnett needed an immediate fix to tackle the overwhelming number of requests for access changes and new access. (In the third quarter of 2012, the number of overall provisioning requests stood at 11,381.) Allen was quick to find a solution. “When you have a partner that excels in the space, you don’t need to look for another to do what they do already,” he said. “We were so satisfied with Password Station, we didn’t even consider another vendor for user provisioning.” Gwinnett purchased Avatier’s user provisioning solution Identity Enforcer in July 2011, and, with just one person working on it 50 percent of the time, it was in production that December. Now, Avatier processes all of Gwinnett’s HR user provisioning tasks. Twice a day, the system looks for changes in personnel positions and reconciles it with the appropriate role in the Avatier IT Store. Based on that role, the system knows and automatically executes the level of access to grant, which Active Directory groups to assign, what menus to turn on, and whatever operations you choose to automate. For a new hire, this means he is fully provisioned and ready to go day one on the job. “This has been very well-received by our analysts,” said Allen. “Before Avatier, the analysts got a work order to remove accesses in the old role and then a separate work order to add the new role. Avatier reconciles these so that there are a lot fewer work orders. Needless to say, that makes both our hospital and IT staff very happy.” Allen credits Avatier with greater efficiency, streamlined business processes and cost reduction. “In health care, budgets are getting tighter but service demands continue to increase.” Allen says. “So anytime I can have a system perform multiple services, it’s a good thing for our bottom line. With Avatier, we’re doing more with less, and we’re more efficient.”