Healthcare is an information intensive, collaborative process at almost every level.  More then ever it is essential that payers, providers and employers work together to deliver quality care. Employer benefit managers need access to their contracts with payers and efficient systems to communicate and resolve employee claims.  Integrated hospital systems need to share contract, referral process and operational information with member hospitals. Project teams that span these entities need to collaborate, plan activities, schedule meetings and share ideas.

A solution encompassing collaboration systems, such as Microsoft SharePoint and the Epok Edition for Microsoft SharePoint is ideal for supporting this broad range of activity among users distributed across many different organizations. The solution allows healthcare managers and other players to manage user access authorizations across multiple organizations, it provides a strong security and policy framework to support information compliance and privacy requirements, and it can scale from use in a single hospital to multi-hospital integrated delivery networks.

With Epok software:

• Healthcare network managers, benefits managers, researchers and other business managers take on responsibility for extranet user access management, which improves IT efficiency and allows the solution to scale to very large numbers of entities and users.
• Proactive policy notification and acknowledgement ensures collaboration and information dissemination activity is controlled and tracked in support of compliance and privacy regulations such as HIPAA.
• Personalized watermarking of sensitive documents with user name, organization and conditions for document use reduce inadvertent disclosure of sensitive records, research data, financial reports and contracts. 
• Users can instantly view a dynamic list of all SharePoint sites for which he or she has access authorization.  User access rights are based on the terms of contractual relationships between employers, insurance companies and healthcare providers which allow site access to terminate automatically when contract periods expire reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
• Confidentiality can be enforced at the site, document library and document level.  This allows healthcare and benefit management personnel to control the access for providers, payers, employers and patients to only the information they need and that they are entitled to see;
• Controls such as automatic access expiration, watermarks, policy acknowledgements, access logs and others within the SharePoint environment dramatically limit opportunities for inadvertent disclosure and other malfeasance.
• Users from geographically dispersed offices, that may use different authentication systems,  can single sign-on to SharePoint sites hosted in any office