National digital identity modernised for health

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora is modernising and consolidating its digital identity solutions to create a faster, more consistent process for up to 125,000 staff logging into its systems every day.

SailPoint has been piloted for corporate users within Health NZ since April, with plans to extend it to clinical systems in the coming months.

Garry Johnston, data and digital programme lead, national programmes, says the legacy systems that supported the 28 entities that became Health NZ still exist and the organisation needs to integrate these disparate systems into a unified framework.

This fragmentation means users, who often work across former DHB boundaries, experience inconsistent onboarding and access processes.

Health NZ has around 125,000 users logging into its systems on a daily basis, including employees, contractors, and external partners.

"Our users still experience the echo of the former organisations that those systems supported," Johnston said.

“We are looking at ways of consolidating and standardising the experience for our users.”

SailPoint is a cloud-based SaaS application and Johnston says the platform is expected to save considerable time and resources.

Previously, provisioning access could sometimes take several days or longer, but the aim is to reduce this to less than 2 hours. This frees up administrative time, allowing staff to focus on more critical tasks, he says.

The cloud-based platform has connectors deployed in each legacy environment. This means it can manage user access and entitlements across legacy systems, ensuring that users have the necessary entitlements based on their roles and locations.

“It makes our users’ experience faster, simpler, and more consistent no matter what legacy environment they connect into. When they start, when they change roles, or when they leave the organisation,” he tells eHealthNews.

Johnston explains that SailPoint is particularly helpful for new employees and those transitioning between roles, as traditionally staff often retained access to systems from previous roles, creating potential security risks.

The new platform ensures access is granted based solely on current needs and system owners can regularly certify and review user access.

“One of the core drivers for this programme of work is freeing staff from the drudgery of provisioning things manually: one of the key challenges for the health system is how we can drive efficiency and reduce the fragmentation that we have today,” he says.

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