Data Privacy in Healthcare

There are two primary stakeholders who need to have complete confidence in their response to privacy issues:

• You as the healthcare provider, administrator or researcher
• Your patients who share their personal data or allow you to collect it from a third party

The reasons for recognizing the need for privacy are obvious:

There are government regulations and industry standards that expect your compliance for the sake of privacy and security.

Info about patients individually and collectively, including demographic data, contact info, diagnoses, test results, referrals and treatments, all need to be securely collected, transmitted, stored and accessed.

Your patients expect their medical information will be shared only with those to whom they have given permission.

Access to the admin infrastructure, including the processing of billings, insurance claims, and compliance requirements should be limited.

You can be held liable for loss of sensitive data. HIPAA is also imposing significant fines for breaching patient data.

Any breach of your IT system can lead to costly downtime as occurred in recent ransomware attacks on UK and US hospitals and a large American drug manufacturer. Production can stop, billing and insurance claims cannot be processed.

Your patients want to have the utmost confidence in your service. Being able to assure them that all data you collect about them is well protected helps establish your credibility and a trusting relationship.

The Digital6 Technologies team makes sure that your patient information and other confidential healthcare data:

• Is never “mined” for information to promote other products and services
• Is stored wherever in the world you want it kept and you always have full access
• Cannot be accessed by any government agency or other third party without all the documents, warrants, permissions and due process in place and, even then, only the minimum data required is provided