A doctor’s job is to save lives, not to do paperwork. Yet every day, doctors are faced with an administrative burden that gets in the way of patient care

Lifen is on a mission to solve that problem with an AI-powered solution that facilitates the secure transfer of medical documents between patients, private practitioners, and hospitals. Users can use Lifen to deliver documents through the platform, secured email, fax, or the postal service, all in just a few clicks.

By automating and streamlining logistics in healthcare, Lifen enables doctors to spend more time on delivering medical care to those who need it.

“Our goal is to reduce the friction in the healthcare ecosystem,” Lifen CTO Dali Kilani explains. However, they were faced with a serious challenge: how to onboard new users and let them share patient information, which is some of the most highly sensitive and highly regulated data in existence.

Outsourcing Identity Results in Big Savings

Lifen started off with their own identity solution, but maintaining it would have consumed time and resources and, by their estimation, could have required up to three full-time staff members costing up to $130,000 annually. This was the first obstacle the startup faced, and they quickly realized that scaling their custom identity solution was distracting them from their core purpose. As Kilani puts it, “Our goal was not to solve authentication problems, but to innovate in healthcare.”

“We were in a situation where we did not want to continue to bear the burden of managing or handling and operating that piece of homegrown software,” Kilani says. Instead, Lifen turned to Auth0 to authenticate all doctors and patients that access their solution. Kilani points out that “Auth0 has helped us tremendously and allowed us to focus on the things that create value to our customers.”

A New Solution Goes to Market in Just Five Days

A few months after implementing Auth0, Lifen was called on by the top virologist in Paris to combat the COVID-19 outbreak.

In just five days, the company implemented a remote monitoring solution for COVID-19 patients where they log in using Auth0 to answer a set of questions that assess their state. The solution allows thousands of patients to stay home and decongests an overwhelmed healthcare system. More importantly, the outbreak proved the use case for Lifen’s technology: without it, patients could have suffered waiting for urgent healthcare.

“It was in record time,” says Kilani. “We’ve put it in the hands of multiple healthcare institutions. Auth0 was a valuable ally in building a secure authentication system within short deadlines.”

Lifen quickly provided an innovative solution to face the crisis, and security was one of the main requirements for the authentication.

Auth0 Meets Compliance Standards and Security Needs

Because healthcare data is so sensitive, storing the data is highly regulated. “Healthcare services require a very high level of certification. Having a service provider like Auth0 allows us to not store any passwords in our system for our customers, which is major. Storing passwords is a burden that impacts ISO 27001,” Kilani says, referring to the international standard used to regulate information security.

Lifen has found that using Auth0 enhances, rather than stifles, their ability to implement creative, innovative solutions. With Auth0's customizable Rules, the team has created unique features. For instance, when doctors working in hospital basements couldn’t receive antifraud authentication codes by SMS, Lifen implemented a landline call solution to solve the problem.

“We've also used Auth0 Rules to verify the customer IP address, and to allow us to migrate customers to our new system,” Kilani says. The original migration solution required users to reset their password manually, an option that generated multiple support calls per day. “After using the Auth0 Rules and implementing more flexibility and diversity in the multi-factor authentication, these problems just disappeared,” he says.

Lifen is now confident in the security and efficacy of their solution and in their partnership with Auth0. “Auth0 maintains the highest level of security that is possible at this point,” Kilani says, adding, “Every single doctor and patient that accesses our solution performs their authentication through Auth0. We’ve put Auth0 at the heart of our service.”