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Jul 24 2025
Security

Across Healthcare, Collaboration Is a Critical Ingredient of Data Security

There are a lot of moving parts in healthcare, but they can’t exist in silos. The CEO of Surescripts explains how working together makes for more secure workflows.

It’s easy to think that each segment of the healthcare industry — health systems, clinicians, pharmacies, insurance plans and security companies, to name a few — is working toward its own specific goals.

But there’s a greater purpose that we all share: improving healthcare for patients and those who care for them.

There are countless innovators working to solve the many complex challenges facing healthcare today, simplifying challenges for doctors, pharmacists, nurses and care managers alike.

But the solutions they tout may not be comprehensive. For example, removing one step for a physician might mean adding two more steps that a pharmacist or care manager must complete down the line.

The intent is right, but the execution lacks the critical ingredient needed for truly impactful innovation: collaboration.

Collaboration continues to drive innovation. One recent example is a partnership between Surescripts and the secure identity platform CLEAR that quickly showed significant improvements for clinicians, reinforcing just why collaboration remains our best bet to meaningfully improve healthcare.

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Raising the Bar for Identity Protection and Making an Impact

Collaboration has been foundational for the Surescripts network, from the first electronic prescriptions sent more than two decades ago. Today, Surescripts has enabled over 27 billion exchanges of patient clinical and benefit information among more than 2 million healthcare professionals and organizations.

It has enabled innovation on a massive, systemic scale, ensuring that patient information flows securely and seamlessly and arrives where it is needed without delay.

Healthcare professionals and organizations rely on this level of collaboration for constant access to timely and accurate healthcare information. But it also requires collaboration from partners across the healthcare ecosystem to maintain the high level of security and identity protections exchanging patient data demands.

It’s why a collaboration with CLEAR made sense. Together, we could raise the bar for identity security, compliance and provider access more effectively than if we worked separately. This partnership would reinforce our commitment to protecting patient information while delivering fast, reliable access to the right data at the right time for healthcare providers across our network.

Once implemented, we could see the impact almost immediately. The collaboration improved workflow efficiency, enabling more providers to successfully verify their identities and gain access to critical tools, allowing them to spend less time on administrative tasks.

Key impacts include:

  • 2x higher verification success rate: By replacing a cumbersome verification process with a user-friendly, Identity Assurance Level 2-compliant solution, providers achieved an 80% success rate for verifications, compared with 41% using the legacy solution, a major improvement given IAL2’s rigorous requirements.
  • 40% faster process: A quick, one-time setup and instant verification with a selfie replaces a lengthy, multistep process, unlocking faster activation compared with knowledge-based authentication.
  • 50% boost in pull-through: More providers are completing onboarding and getting to work faster.

READ MORE: Navigate identity and access management in the era of AI.

Collaboration Is Key to Accelerating Health Tech Innovation

This collaboration sets the stage for future use cases across our network, from clinical messaging to secure credential recovery. But more important, it empowers providers to focus on providing safe, quality care for their patients.

As we look to the future, it is imperative that innovators think holistically so that we aren’t solving one problem while exacerbating another. Leveraging collaboration with stakeholders is the best way to overcome obstacles — and many of the unintended consequences of narrowly focused innovations.

We believe that innovations built on collaboration will benefit the entire process and are likely to have an outsized positive impact for patients and those who care for them.

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