Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Selects Courion to Automate Provisioning and Password Management; Courion's enterprise provisioning solutions to reduce costs, increase productivity and improve security

Business Wire, Sept 19, 2005

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- Courion(R) Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise provisioning solutions, today announced that Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, has selected Courion's AccountCourier(R) for enterprise provisioning and PasswordCourier(R) for password management as part of its identity management strategy to help the organization achieve compliance, reduce costs, improve customer service levels and improve security.

Located in Chicago's northern suburbs, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare is an academic health system affiliated with Northwestern University. Comprised of 3 hospitals as well as ENH Home Services, ENH Medical Group, ENH Research Institute, and the ENH Foundation, ENH counts on its Information Systems department to manage the centralized IT infrastructure for all affiliated institutions. With a diverse and mobile user community that includes physicians, nurses, administrators, students and contractors, it is critical that ENH provide users immediate access to the information they need to care for patients while simultaneously ensure that the access is appropriate and compliant with state and federal laws such as HIPAA.

With a dynamic and transient population of caregivers needing access to more and more applications, ENH sought to automate account provisioning to streamline the process for revoking user account access to ensure compliance and maintain patient privacy. The organization also wanted to facilitate caregiver access to resources and increase the efficiency of business operations and needed a solution to automate the manual, costly process of managing passwords. A significant percentage of calls to the Help Desk were due to password resets because ENH's method for password management was completely manual. The implications of this slow, cumbersome process could be critical to a doctor's need to gain immediate access to important and time sensitive patient data. In addition, valuable IT assets were dedicated to these manual tasks, taking them away from higher order initiatives.

ENH chose Courion because it uniquely met the customer's needs for a flexible solution that provided tight cross-platform integration and would enable the organization to extend its provisioning solution to meet the ever-changing needs of their business. "Courion provided us ease of use - particularly in terms of administering and maintaining the system, enabled us to leverage our exiting infrastructure and has the flexibility to expand with our business and support change over time," said Pat Pallesen, director of data center services for ENH. "Everything we do in IT needs to reflect back to the care of the patient. Courion will enable us to quickly provide value back to the business, our users and most importantly our patients."

"Putting technology in place to ensure users have immediate and appropriate access to critical information has a direct benefit to patient care," said Deb Pappas, vice president of market strategy for Courion Corporation " By ensuring, through automation, that the right people have the right access to systems, applications and information, ENH is putting the needs of the patient first without compromising IT and security policies."

Courion has over 255 enterprise customers worldwide including leading healthcare organizations such as Blue Cross Blue Shield Alabama, Capital District Physician's Health Plan, Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, The Health Alliance, HEALTHSOUTH, Highmark, Inc., Indiana University Medical Group, Kaiser Permanente, Sharp HealthCare and VCU Health Systems.

About Evanston Northwestern Healthcare

Located in Chicago's northern suburbs, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare (ENH) is an integrated healthcare system that includes Evanston, Glenbrook and Highland Park Hospitals, ENH Medical Group, ENH Home Services, ENH Research Institute and ENH Foundation.

Through its affiliation with Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, ENH supports extensive medical education and research programs. ENH is in the top 9 percent of all institutions that receive funding from the National Institutes of Health; among multi-specialty independent research hospitals it ranks 12th in the nation.

ENH is also recognized as a leader for implementing technology and improving processes to advance the safety and quality of patient care. Hospitals and Health Networks magazine has named ENH one of the "Most Wired" healthcare organizations in the nation.

About Courion

Courion enables complex organizations to rapidly respond to constant change. Unlike traditional identity and access management technologies, Courion's Dynamic Community(TM)-based Provisioning empowers organizations to deliver transparent compliance, sustained efficiencies and improved business velocity, by effectively adapting to and leveraging their changing business operations, technology infrastructure and organization. Over 255 enterprise customers worldwide including 60 of the FORTUNE 500 utilize Courion's Enterprise Provisioning Suite(TM) to securely automate routine, manual processes for user provisioning, password management, industry and regulatory compliance, profile management, and digital certificate management. For more information, contact Courion's headquarters in Framingham, MA, USA at 508-879-8400 or visit www.courion.com.