How Omada Health Keeps Patient Data Safer at Half the Cost with Island

How can a digital healthcare company better serve the people who rely on its services, all while keeping their health data safer than ever – just by changing its browser? 

Omada Health, a virtual care program specializing in chronic disease prevention and management, has more than 1,900 customers worldwide including health plans, health systems, and employers ranging in size from small businesses to Fortune 500s. On a recent episode of CXOTalk, Omada Health CISO Bill Dougherty shared with host Michael Krigsman how the company uses the Island Enterprise Browser to simplify their IT landscape, reduce costs, and make life easier for end users – all while protecting their highly sensitive, HIPAA-covered data.

Here are three ways Omada Health uses Island Enterprise Browser for improved productivity and security. 

1. Unifying under a single browser to reduce IT tickets and gain back time

“Before we adopted an enterprise browser, we were managing three to five different browsers on Macs and three to five different browsers on PCs,” said Dougherty. All those browsers were difficult to patch and keep consistent.

By deploying an enterprise browser as the primary browser, Omada Health has minimized those browser-related tickets and issues, significantly decreasing demands on their IT support team. As a result, Omada’s IT team is empowered to tackle higher-level challenges.

“It's less software for me to patch and worry about on a daily basis,” said Dougherty. “And I now have enterprise control of our browser extensions, so we have less risk of malicious third-party extensions coming in because no extension can be installed that we don't review and approve.” 

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2. Consolidating tools for lower costs and better experience

The Island Enterprise Browser is simplifying Omada Health's IT landscape by consolidating multiple tools into one. 

“We had an observability tool that we didn't like,” explained Dougherty. “It wasn't doing the job, and it was very expensive.”

In contrast, the Island Enterprise Browser costs half of what Omada Health was paying for their observability tool – and “Island works way better,” said Dougherty. In addition, Omada Health’s engineers gained a performance boost on their endpoints because they were running one less agent. 

As a bonus, said Dougherty, the Island Enterprise Browser includes a built-in password manager rolled out to 100% of their end users — something only about 5% of users had access to before — all at no additional cost.

"Ultimately, I get the entire stack of Island for half of what I was paying for a standalone observability tool."

This consolidation also resulted in a seamless user experience. “From the end user's perspective, they wake up in the morning, they log into their laptop, and then they log into Island,” explained Dougherty. “When they log into Island, that logs them into our IDP. Then they can just start using our SaaS applications.”

“When we do go out and look at new solutions, one of the things we're looking at is what holes does it plug. The other is what else can it replace. And the third is what's the impact on the end user,” said Dougherty. “It just happened that the confluence of our discussions with Island is we were able to tick all three boxes.”

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3. Simplifying the complexities of securing healthcare data 

Omada Health provides its users with a series of smartphone apps as well as connected devices like scales, glucometers, and blood pressure devices — all delivered over the internet. That’s a significant amount of sensitive health data — all of which Omada Health must protect with the strongest possible security measures. 

Further complicating matters are all the vendors Omada Health partners with, including hundreds of coaches and specialists who provide users a personalized experience to help them manage their diseases. Every single one of those partners presents a third-party risk that Omada Health must manage.

“You've got three things that are in tension with each other. I want to get more secure for less money with better user experience. Not an easy task.”

“If our members don't trust that we are good stewards of their data, and our customers don't trust that we're good stewards of their data, they won't do business with us,” said Dougherty. “And bad security becomes a blocker to people getting a good health outcome.”

The Island Enterprise Browser gives Omada Health better control and security over browser use, as well as integrates seamlessly with their identity provider (IDP). This way, Omada Health can seamlessly enforce policies across all partners and users, ensuring security without compromising user experience.

“Simplifying that user experience and baking the security controls into the toolset, it just helps everybody,” said Dougherty.

To learn all the ways Omada Health is using the Island Enterprise Browser to optimize its platform for employees and users alike, catch the full episode here.

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