secure and easy access with a branded authenticator app

the challenge

‘Not all of our patients have the capacity to remember their usernames and passwords, but security and privacy are vital in a sensitive environment such as ours’, says Irma de Puijker, Head of Automation at Philadelphia’s Information & Automation (I&A) department.

‘However, SMS passcodes are not only expensive but also complicated to use. So, we looked for a two-factor login solution that was both very accessible and highly secure. And what is safer and simpler than your own face?’ she says.

Philadelphia had been in touch with OneWelcome as early as 2016, when our stand-alone White Label Authenticator App was recommended by the organisation’s digital-library supplier. ‘Our mindset wasn’t ready yet’, Irma explains. ‘We were still adamant for the solution to be on-premise, but that proved to be too much of a technical and organisational challenge. The number of external parties involved in our value chain simply made it too complex to succeed. At the time, our reservations against the cloud may have been justified, but the market has strongly developed since. That’s why, in 2019, we decided to go SaaS with OneWelcome, in the process eliminating several links in the chain. From that moment on, the project quickly gathered speed.’

When the two parties originally met, OneWelcome was the only vendor offering face recognition as a means of authentication. Yet, by 2019, that situation had changed. Still, Philadelphia wanted to stick with OneWelcome. ‘OneWelcome’s White Label Authenticator App is invisible to our users’, says Irma, ‘as it’s fully integrated into our corporate identity. Also, we had built a strong relationship and gained a mutual trust in that initial on-premise stage of the project. OneWelcome has a strong presence in financial services but showed a very determined commitment to succeed in healthcare too. We wanted to offer them the opportunity to prove their worth.’