The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) is one of Europe’s oldest and most respected medical training institutions. Since 1654, it has shaped generations of healthcare professionals. Today, RCPI supports more than 15,000 doctors, trainees, members, and fellows in 95 countries, across 29 medical specialties.
But with this global reach came complexity. Doctors regularly rotated between hospitals and countries, often using multiple email addresses, shared credentials, and inconsistent logins. As a result, RCPI lacked a clear, secure view of its users — leading to inefficiencies in administration, compliance challenges, and limited personalisation of digital services.
From fragmented access to seamless identity
To address this, RCPI partnered with Spanish Point to modernise its Identity and Access Management (IAM) using Microsoft Entra External ID and Microsoft’s broader security ecosystem. The transformation unified 13 previously siloed systems into a single, secure identity platform, delivering a 50% reduction in administrative overhead.
The new solution introduced seamless Single Sign-On (SSO) across all RCPI services, multi-factor authentication (MFA) for enterprise-grade security, and automated provisioning to manage the lifecycle of 86,000 user accounts. It also enabled role-based access controls tailored to each user group, self-service onboarding and recovery for improved usability, and advanced auditing tools that enhanced governance and compliance.
For the first time, RCPI could confidently identify and authenticate each user, enabling secure, streamlined access to services and could gain insights into how users engaged across its digital platforms.
“This global implementation has dramatically changed how our doctors access the services they need across the world. Our platform can now seamlessly support over 2,300 logins a day, at a scale that did not exist before."
Michael Hughes
CTO at RCPI
Built to scale — proven under pressure
Thanks to the platform’s modern architecture — with built-in fraud detection, rate limiting, and secure design principles — RCPI has successfully mitigated a variety of targeted global cybersecurity threats this year. With the optimised platform, RCPI experienced no downtime, no compromise of data, and no service disruption, validating the resilience of the Microsoft Entra solution and reinforcing the decision to modernise identity as a strategic priority.
According to Microsoft’s Digital Defense Report 2025, malicious bot activity is now responsible for the vast majority of fake account creation attempts globally. In the first half of 2025, over 90% of the 15.9 billion Microsoft account creation requests were generated by bad bots, and Microsoft’s anti-fraud systems blocked approximately 1.6 million bot-driven or fake sign-ups every hour across its services.
Measurable impact
The business outcomes were immediate and significant. RCPI achieved a 50% reduction in administrative overhead, improved onboarding times, and elevated user satisfaction. Stronger audit capabilities also ensured greater compliance readiness. When a global security breach targeting Microsoft users impacted RCPI systems in mid-2025, the multi-factor authentication delivered through the IAM solution deterred over 17,000 infiltration attempts, maintaining full continuity of service throughout. For end users, from trainees to consultants, the result was a more secure, intuitive experience, tailored to their training stage, location, and role. These improvements have supported higher engagement, better programme conversions, and more insightful service design.
A model for regulated education
The success of this project has positioned RCPI as a model for secure, scalable identity transformation in regulated medical education. Institutions facing similar challenges around rotating users, shared credentials, and compliance can look to this deployment as an example of what’s possible with a modern identity platform.
Shane Devenney, Custom Application Development Lead at Spanish Point explains, “With organisations like RCPI, there’s a constant flow of people coming in and out, so having one central place to manage users really matters. The self-service features take pressure off internal teams, and single sign-on means doctors and trainees aren’t juggling multiple logins. These are challenges most education organisations face, which is why this approach works so well and can be easily repeated at scale.”
Strong technology, stronger partnership
Spanish Point’s ability to tailor Microsoft’s enterprise IAM tools to RCPI’s complex environment was essential to the project’s success. Just as importantly, the two organisations worked in true partnership — sharing problem-solving, iterating post-launch, and building in the flexibility needed to support RCPI’s evolving digital roadmap.
“We were in close communication with RCPI throughout the project, from development through to go-live. They were proactive and engaged, and any feedback they shared was quickly acted on.”
Shane Devenney
Custom Application Development Lead at Spanish Point
The unified identity foundation also enables RCPI to advance future data and AI initiatives by consolidating accurate user profiles across systems. This transformation marks a strategic shift in how RCPI supports its global network, with Spanish Point as a trusted partner for the journey ahead.
As RCPI continues to evolve, expand, and embrace new digital opportunities, it does so with a modern identity infrastructure that is resilient, secure, and ready to scale.
Spanish Point remains a committed partner in that journey. With each implementation, the company aims not only to deliver a solution, but to become an extension of its clients’ teams, supporting long-term innovation, adaptation, and growth.
