One of the Largest U.S. Healthcare Providers Meets HIPAA Compliance Requirements, Improves Service Level Delivery

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Company Background

Our client is a non-profit teaching hospital and regional referral center offering full-service hospitals as well as specialty medical and surgical care. The organization also consists of rehabilitation and psychiatric hospitals, as well as a Level II trauma center.

Challenges and Requirements

Each night, our client transfers large batches of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), including patient and procedure information, to partners such as collections companies, market research organizations, and government reporting agencies. When the organization approached PKWARE, they were using PKZIP to compress data for nightly and monthly batch processing; the amount of data being processed had grown considerably since the initial implementation of the product. As a result, they were looking to reduce AS/400 resource utilization and increase the speed of large file transfers.

In addition, recent highly publicized data breaches, as well as required compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other regulations, prompted our client to begin their search for a data security solution that would protect patient and employee information being transferred.

The Solution - SecureZIP

Our client’s history with PKWARE and its products made the selection of SecureZIP an easy one. The product’s reliability and ease of use also played a large role in the organization’s decision. “We haven’t had a single problem with it,” said the organization’s AS/400 Operations Manager & Security Officer.

By leveraging the ZIP compression standard, SecureZIP allows our client to reduce the steps and complexity associated with data encryption by integrating directly into their current FTP process. Faster batch processing transfers to partners frees bandwidth and disk space. In addition, partner acceptance of ZIP as a standard, regardless of computing platform, emphasized the product’s ease of use and rapid adoption.

SecureZIP’s encryption capabilities helped the organization meet the compliance requirements outlined by HIPAA. Adding security to their data exchange processes protects our client’s reputation and brand, as well as ensuring they do not fall victim to a data breach similar to those recently publicized.

Using SecureZIP, the organization now automatically compresses and encrypts data for nightly and monthly batch processing; this provides the ability to compress multiple files at once and also provides end-to-end encryption of sensitive files. In addition, the organization not only solved their immediate requirements, but they also now have the ability to compress and encrypt their backup files for off-site storage, which lowers costs associated with media and expensive “white glove” transport methods.