Metz Jury Public Mental Health Service
Elevating access management security while optimizing user experience
Challenges:
> Address the challenges of the ambulatory care shift with secure remote access to electronic patient records
> Reduce IT security exposure by implementing a Zero Trust strategy
> Optimize user experience while simplifying IT operations for Metz Jury Public Mental Health Service
Solution :
> cyberelements Access
> cyberelements Cleanroom
> cyberelements Gate
> cyberelements Identity
Benefits:
> Enhance user experience
> Strengthen security for remote access
> Eliminate cyber risk from orphaned accounts
We have built a close and collaborative relationship with cyberelements, a partner we can count on. Their teams have supported us for several years in implementing our Zero Trust strategy to reduce our security exposure and address the challenges of our shift toward outpatient care. This transition requires flexible yet highly secure access to patient health data.
The Challenges
Metz Jury Public Mental Health Service is a public mental health establishment and member of the Lorraine Nord Healthcare Group, providing psychiatric care to patients in central and northern Moselle. The Service encompasses adult psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry, and addiction medicine departments, representing over 750 staff members (including 55 medical personnel and approximately 680 non-medical staff). It operates a 156-bed hospital as well as psychological health centers, day hospitals, and outpatient clinics across approximately 20 distributed sites.
Metz Jury Public Mental Health Service successfully transitioned to an ambulatory care model, which has dramatically reduced long-term hospitalizations while promoting outpatient care, psychological health center visits, and intensive home-based psychiatric treatment. To support this shift, the establishment needed to implement solutions that would enable secure and seamless staff mobility.
The original need was to simplify IT administration tasks while improving user experience. This led the Service to deploy Virtual Desktop Workplace to replace its aging Citrix infrastructure and virtualize business applications. Continuing this commitment to optimal user experience combined with enhanced access security, the Service subsequently deployed cyberelements Access, a Single Sign-On solution enabling unified authentication, cyberelements Gate, a Zero Trust Network Access solution securing remote access for ambulatory care clinicians, and cyberelements Bastion to protect privileged access for external service providers.
Finally, to eliminate cyber risk from active accounts belonging to former staff, the Service implemented cyberelements Identity, an Identity Governance and Administration solution providing rigorous identity and access rights management.
Improve User Experience
To provide flexible application access for all staff, the Service sought to replace its aging Citrix infrastructure. « After evaluating several options, we selected Virtual Desktop Workplace, which delivered significant efficiency gains, », explains Stéphane Wicker, Director of Digital Services at Metz Jury Public Mental Health Service. Today, all business applications including the Electronic Patient Record are published through the Virtual Desktop Workplace portal (HTML 5), while office productivity applications and internet access remain local on user workstations. « This approach created a secure segmentation model aligned with our Zero Trust strategy. »
The Service subsequently simplified authentication for users by deploying cyberelements Access, a Single Sign-On solution that transparently authenticates users to their applications when they log into the access portal.
Strengthening Remote Access Security
Healthcare delivery has undergone significant transformation in recent years. Previously, it was sufficient to install workstations in hospital care units. Today, an increasing number of clinicians visit patients in their homes or at facilities remote from the hospital. To address the challenge of flexible yet secure application access, the Service deployed cyberelements Gate to enable secure access for mobile and remote work scenarios. Clinicians working in the intensive home-based psychiatric care program now securely access patient records remotely from devices managed by the establishment. For remote work arrangements, staff can use either organization-managed devices or their personal workstations.
« We strengthened primary authentication by implementing multi-factor authentication with OTP via SMS, and reduced our attack surface by applying context-aware security rules, » explains the IT team.
In parallel, Metz Jury Public Mental Health Service needed visibility into external service provider activities. The IT department deployed cyberelements Bastion to monitor actions by privileged third-party users on the IT infrastructure. The solution records all provider sessions, and its Live Streaming capability enables real-time session monitoring and immediate response to detected anomalies allowing administrators to suspend or terminate sessions if necessary.
cyberelements Bastion is essential to our operations. The solution provides complete visibility into our systems. We can monitor in real-time exactly what's happening on our IT infrastructure, which substantially elevates our access security level.
Eliminating Cyber Risk from Orphaned Accounts
« The number one cyber risk we identified within the organization was continued system access for staff who were no longer employed. We lacked timely visibility into employee arrivals and departures, which drove our need for a solution enabling rigorous access management,» explains Stéphane Wicker.
The Service therefore decided to deploy cyberelements Identity to automate this process. Previously, the IT team manually created user accounts, which was extremely time-consuming and prone to errors. Today, cyberelements Identity leverages the HR system as a source of truth to automatically create Active Directory accounts, provision 70% of access rights automatically, and deprovision accounts when employees depart.
We are impressed by the tool's capabilities! it generates precise alerts at exactly the right moments, such as when an employee name changes, and it has freed up considerable time that we can now invest in strategic projects rather than tedious, repetitive tasks with no real value.