Social and healthcare studies involve numerous internship periods, during which students should be able to use the different patient care and IT systems without delay. Managing access rights is a complex puzzle, as there are many students and internships are often short and numerous. The solution to the problem lies in automated self-service registration.
Future doctors, nurses, and other social and healthcare professionals have a lot of practical training included in their studies. Each intern needs access to the workplace’s facilities and systems according to their internship role. Managing access rights is a multifaceted entity, and handling it manually has become nearly impossible or at least very time-consuming leading to many problems.
Fortunately, there is an effective solution: self-service registration for interns with strong authentication. Self-service enrolment process has been implemented in a large hospital where its benefits have already been proven.
Challenging access rights management
In our example hospital, over 2,000 students complete more than 5,000 internship periods annually. Managing the required access rights was quite a swamp as it was done entirely manually. Account and access right requests were first made on a Word form after which identities and access rights were created by hand for all systems. Because the work was burdensome accounts and rights were made permanent for five years which was clearly a risk from a security perspective.
The manual process caused plenty of problems; it was very expensive due to its labor intensity but also error-prone. Typing errors or wrong information caused much additional work for the IT support. Reviewing or reporting on the process afterward was extremely difficult as information wasn’t digitally recorded during registration.
An added complication arose when many interns became employees of that hospital after their studies ended; manually created identities unnecessarily occupied user names in systems during internships and couldn’t automatically convert into employee identities resulting in more problem-solving work.
The already difficult process was further complicated because tightened privacy requirements meant that hospitals could no longer receive student’s personal identity codes directly from educational institutions.
Self-Service Registration and automation overcame the challenge
Problems caused by manual processes were overcome by implementing student self-service registration; student’s data for internships are brought directly from Finnish universities’ internship reservation system Jobiili or directly from universities’ HR-systems for registration purposes.
Self-service registration begins with an invitation sent via email to students who log into self-service using school credentials or with their own bank credentials; service then guides students updating contact details accepting terms before sending request creating user accounts and access rights needed systems can also be fully automated.
Self-service registration always leaves a trace, and information about the registered student also reaches the supervisor.
More efficient operations, better user experience, improved security
The implementation of self-service registration enhanced the hospital’s operations and reduced the amount of administrative routine work, as all tasks related to students’ internship periods and necessary accounts could be automated. The service also collects the user’s data processing consent and ensures the approval of other necessary terms and confidentityentiality agreements.
Thanks to the solution, all necessary identities and rights are prepared for the student before the start of the internship, so they can immediately start the actual work. The identities are created in the hospital’s identity management system to keep track of the lifecycle, so the same identity can be assigned to the intern later if they become an employee.
The hospital’s security has improved. There is no longer a need to send personal identitification numbers or other personal information in unprotected emails. With automated lifecycle management and each granted access right based on internship information, there is no need to grant rights for too long “just in case”, and manually created user accounts and access rights do not linger in the systems.
Clear savings
Transitioning to self-service registration has saved the hospital a significant amount of money. Assuming that there are 2,000 students interning at the hospital each year and that registering one student manually takes one hour, it saves 266 person-days per year.
If the cost of one person-day is defined as €500/d, the annual savings amount to €133,000/a. It is worth noting that the above calculation is an extremely simplified example that only considened the savings generated by creating new student identities.
Additional savings are generated, for example, when the management of user rights, deletion or recreation of identities for a new internship period does not need to be done manually.
Convenient self-service registration with Haidion Seafront
Haidion Seafront Registration Service is a self-service interface through which users and rights can be registered by themselves. Information about a self-registered student also reaches the supervisor as well as gets provisioined to the identity management solution, which can then in turn automate the creation of user accounts and access rights.