Catholic Healthcare West Success Story

Novell Cool Solutions: Feature

Digg This - Slashdot This Posted: 17 May 2006

Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., is the eighth largest hospital system in the nation and the largest not-for-profit hospital provider in California with more than 9,500 beds. The CHW network of more than 7,500 physicians and approximately 40,000 employees provides quality healthcare services during more than four million patient visits annually.

Challenge

As with many healthcare organizations, many of Catholic Healthcare West's facilities had locally developed information systems and software. As a result, the organization was managing disparate systems and platforms across 40 hospitals and medical centers. Each location also had its own way of managing network access and user identities for nearly 1,400 applications.

To streamline IT operations, CHW wanted to move away from proprietary platforms and create a standardized and open environment. The organization also wanted to create a standard approach to identity and access management that would increase security and meet regulatory requirements, while still giving physicians and staff fast access to applications.

Novell Solution

After thorough research, including talking to many customers who had implemented identity management across a large enterprise, Catholic Healthcare West selected a Novell® identity and access management solution to run on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server.

"We operate in a highly regulated environment where the requirements are always changing. We simply had to consolidate identity management or we would see a huge increase in time spent managing regulatory issues. The identity and access management solution provided by Novell helps us stay ahead of the curve." Eric Leader - Chief Technology Architect, Catholic Healthcare West

CHW consolidated all of its directories and migrated its Windows NT* domains to Novell eDirectory^TM to manage 20,000 user identities. Novell Identity Manager synchronizes user identity information across applications running on multiple platforms including Microsoft Windows*, Linux and multiple versions of UNIX*.

"Many of our applications require Microsoft Active Directory, but we were uncomfortable standardizing on a proprietary platform," said Leader. "Novell eDirectory supports open standards and allows us to manage identities across our diverse environment."

With centralized identity management, CHW can provision users three times faster, giving them immediate access to the applications they need. Users even have a single ID and password for many applications that are integrated with eDirectory. CHW will also be using Novell SecureLogin to give users single sign-on access to applications that are not LDAP-enabled.

With a Novell identity and access management solution, Catholic Healthcare West centralized identity management across its diverse enterprise and reduced initial user administration time by 70 percent. The organization has increased security with role-based access, auditing capabilities, and streamlined provisioning and deprovisioning to immediately grant or revoke access.

For the entire success story, see:
http://www.novell.com/success/catholic_healthcare_west.html

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