In recent years, numerous institutions which create, store, and complete transactions using Protected Health Information (PHI) have come under increasing regulatory pressure to protect this information from unauthorized access, use, and disclosure.  Notably, Title II of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires healthcare payors and providers in the United States to submit to new privacy and security policies.  These policies are intended to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation's healthcare system by encouraging the widespread use of electronic data interchange.

As we all know, however, simply migrating patient records to a electronic system is no guarantee that patient data will remain secure.  On the contrary: as information sharing both within and among insurers and healthcare providers increases, with complex dataflows reaching far beyond the confines of a single organization, the risk of privacy information exposures increases.  Some of these exposures are the result of malicious intent; more common are errors in records administration.  Patient identifiers may be unknowingly embedded in content not treated as secure and then inadvertently exposed.  Such breaches can be costly, and federal authorities are stepping up enforcement of civil and criminal penalties in these cases.

Ascentium taxonomy services is partnering with Concept Searching to provide a solution to mitigate the risk of PHI exposures.   The PHIdiscovery tool uses advanced algorithms which are able to automatically identify content containing PHI from among a variety of content types -- emails, faxes, web pages, scanned documents, and Microsoft Office applications --and channel that content to a separate location for review and disposition by records managers.   Our taxonomy team is able to customize those algorithms using different selection criteria, including identifiers defined by HIPAA as well as identifiers specific to individual organizations.

For more information, read the PHIdiscovery data sheet.