Leading Healthcare Organization Protects Sensitive Data, Meets HIPAA Compliance Requirements

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Company Background

Our client, a large healthcare organization, has become a nationally recognized leader in efforts to improve the quality of healthcare. The organization’s array of additional services include community clinics in partnership with local medical schools, home care and hospice services, QuickCare clinics, and others.

Challenges and Requirements

Our client needed a secure, reliable enterprise solution for data exchange that offered strong encryption in order to meet HIPAA regulations. The organization had recently undertook an effort to digitize most of its records to ensure HIPAA compliance, reduce its reliance on tape backups, and, most importantly, make sure its patients had the most current records available when visiting an affiliated facility. It also needed to be able to securely exchange large volumes of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), including patient health records, from its mainframe computers to business partners and suppliers.

Competitive Landscape

The organization wanted to ensure that if their information was intercepted in transmission, it could not be accessed. Simultaneously, due to the size of the files being transmitted, they needed a way to compress them. To address this issue, they explored several data encryption options, including PGP® and SecureZIP. The organization had to make sure the chosen solution would work in its heterogeneous computing environment. So, rather than having to find an encryption utility for each individual platform, they wanted one product that could handle all of their compression and encryption needs from a centralized IBM® z/OS system.

The Solution - SecureZIP

The organization selected SecureZIP for z/OS to enable strong encryption. This allowed them to send information via FTP to their partners directly from the data center, saving time and money. SecureZIP provided straight-forward implementation and its interoperability meant it could be implemented on platforms throughout the organization. Now, the organization has a centralized tool that allows users of other servers to FTP their files to their z/OS mainframe and have them compressed, encrypted, and transmitted.