Do You Know Where Your Sensitive Data Is? Really?

Now, more than ever, healthcare covered entities such as Health Plans, Physicians and Hospitals must understand where PHI exists, who has access to it and with whom they are sharing it. If your organization can't confidently answer those questions, you may want to consider Sensitive Data Management technology.

G2 Management Group, LLC works with an advanced data technology firm who has developed the first integrated data security solution that discovers, protects and monitors sensitive data at rest and in motion throughout the enterprise without negatively impacting productivity.

In additional to understanding where sensitive data resides and where it goes, healthcare organizations often need to distribute or share data for studies, public health analysis, disease management and other projects. Where PHI needs to be distributed, data obfuscation or de-identification is necessary, especially to comply with privacy standards and good security practice.

Traditional approaches, such as encryption, often reduce the intrinsic business value of the data. Some Sensitive Data Management tools can mask, encrypt or obfuscate the data depending on the level of security required. Unlike data masking, hashing and scrambling, obfuscation removes the sensitive nature of the data while retaining its intrinsic business value. For example, an obfuscated social security number (SSN) will still look and feel like an SSN to the data consumer. An obfuscated street address will still look like a real mailing address.

Sensitive Data Management tools can help you to achieve compliance with HIPAA privacy and security standards and realize the following benefits:

• Generate desensitized data that looks and acts like real data
• Allow use of desensitized production data for testing
• Maintain referential integrity between multiple source systems over time
• Reduce reliance on endpoint security needs when data is lost via a stolen laptop, USB key, CDs, emailed files, etc.
• Produce consistent, repeatable obfuscation across multiple data extracts and multiple source systems
• Provide ability to access original source system data
• Provide audit trail to demonstrate data validity

Contact us to discover where your sensitive data really is and how to ensure that it is protected.

Tapping the brakes on Healthcare Costs using Supply Efficiency Scoring

Have you considered how healthcare economics seem to be at odds with classic free market performance trends? Why is it that increased supply leads to increased utilization? In Healthcare Law, Christopher C. Gallager cites John Wennberg, of Dartmouth, who offered critical testimony on the connection between the availability of health care providers and utilization...with health care, supply drives demand. This leads to "unwarranted care," which leads in turn to higher costs for everyone in the health care system.

One example of this dynamic may be found in the artificial demand brought on by the practice of investment in medical technology, in this case imaging and diagnostic services, to generate revenue for the healthcare practitioner/practice. In HealthLeadersMedia Industry Survey 2009, 59% of non-rural practices plan to add an ancillary service to increase revenue in the next three years.

Supply Efficiency Scoring is a strategic reimbursement innovation for imaging and diagnostic services that promises to slow the growth of healthcare costs by eliminating artificial demand without disrupting free market activity or applying administrative review techniques.

In my opinion, Supply Efficiency Scoring has the potential to be an effective, measured innovation in cost control that should be considered by health plans with fee-for-service contracts for imaging and diagnostic services.

You may be interested to help validate this concept by participating in a demonstration project. For more information, read the entire article or contact G2 Management Group directly.