Owens & Minor, a global healthcare solutions company, needed to modernize authentication for two mission-critical applications. With limited identity development resources availability and a desire to focus on core business rather than authentication, they turned to Descope to help implement passwordless login and self-service SSO. This freed their engineering team to concentrate on what truly matters: innovating essential healthcare solutions.
About Owens & Minor
Owens & Minor, Inc. is a Fortune 500 healthcare solutions organization that has been operating since 1882. The Richmond, Virginia-based company serves over 4000 provider facilities worldwide, delivering essential products and services that support care from the hospital to the home.
As healthcare continues to face increasing market pressures, Owens & Minor remains focused on innovation: developing technology-driven solutions that streamline operations and provide better accountability throughout the supply chain.
The applications
Owens & Minor operates several specialized applications supporting different aspects of their healthcare logistics business. Two key apps required authentication upgrades:
OMFreight+™ is Owens & Minor’s transportation and logistics application, enabling distributors to track and log hauls, look up trucking contracts, and upload invoices. The platform offers exclusive savings and expert freight management to ensure efficient and cost-effective delivery.
QSight® is Owens & Minor’s HIPAA-compliant, perpetual inventory management solution for healthcare settings. It integrates with a health system’s IT infrastructure to capture end-to-end inventory data while optimizing utilization.
Ashish Sarkar, Chief Information Officer at Owens & Minor, said:
“Our customers rely on us to deliver real-time visibility into healthcare logistics, whether that’s knowing when to order more of a specific item or how to optimize freight costs. That trust calls for excellence not just in our operations, but also in our user experience.”
The challenges
For OMFreight+™, Owens & Minor was using an existing identity platform with password-based authentication. This presented several challenges for their lean engineering team:
Difficulty collecting important user information during authentication. With the current platform, gathering critical data like carrier tracking numbers and customer-specific information required developing DIY logins with homegrown logic. This meant considerable development effort would be needed to build and maintain authentication.
Going passwordless was a priority, but would take resources away from other parts of the app. Owens & Minor wanted to remove passwords from the OMFreight+™ experience, but they wished to retain the security ecosystem they’d built with Google’s Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP).
For QSight, the challenge was significantly different. The current application needed to support single sign-on (SSO) for their B2B customers, who were hospitals and healthcare organizations. These providers often brought a wide variety of existing identity systems needing manual configuration. The dev team quickly realized self-service SSO could eliminate much of the back-and-forth with QSight customers.
The Descope experience
For OMFreight+™, Descope integrated as an OpenID provider for Google’s Identity Platform. Owens & Minor was able to implement email one-time password (OTP) authentication for all users without having to change any code in the application itself.
A key component of the solution was a custom connector that obtained carrier account numbers and other essential user information from the Owens & Minor backend. This data would be included as custom claims within authentication tokens, eliminating the need for additional API calls and improving visibility without extensive development work.
For QSight, Descope implemented SAML SSO for new customers on the current version of the app. The self-service SSO configuration capabilities allowed healthcare providers to easily connect their existing identity systems to QSight without requiring hands-on support for the Owens & Minor team.
Ashish Sarkar, Chief Information Officer at Owens & Minor, said:
“Working with Descope was incredibly easy. We didn’t have to throw away our old system to get all the benefits of passwordless or SSO. Now, our team has new tools and Descope lets us keep the environment we’re comfortable with.”
The results
The deployment of Descope across both applications delivered immediate benefits:
Freed developer focus from troubleshooting auth and refocused on core business
Simplified creating new identity flows with low/no-code visual interface
Enhanced security by eliminating passwords while keeping existing infrastructure intact
Provided a strong foundation for future improvements, like a new version of the QSight application
The process of adding Descope was highly efficient, with phased implementation taking less than a month to roll out. By retaining the identity environment Owens & Minor customers were familiar with, Descope augmented both usability and security without disrupting the user experience.
Through implementing their Descope deployment, Owens & Minor has been able to deliver modern, resilient authentication across multiple applications without sacrificing precious time or developer resources. This refocusing on core functions allows their engineers to contribute more to key business processes, ensuring Owens & Minor customers continue receiving optimized, efficient, and accountable logistics solutions.
Ashish Sarkar, Chief Information Officer at Owens & Minor, said:
“When we first approached Descope, we had two main objectives: reducing reliance on passwords, and collecting and leveraging custom claims in our user journeys. Not only have we achieved both, we’re now able to build flows and handle customer SSO configuration without dedicated developer cycles.”
Descope is a flexible, drag & drop CIAM platform that helps organizations easily add authentication, authorization, and identity management to their apps. Customers use us for initiatives such as passwordless authentication, SSO, identity federation, strong MFA, identity orchestration, and fraud prevention.
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