A major US healthcare system has updated and streamlined its patient privacy auditing and incident risk management in a bid to be a patient privacy leader.
Intermountain Healthcare, based in Salt Lake City, Utah has entered into a joint development partnership with Iatric Systems, a comprehensive healthcare IT integration company, whose Security Audit Manager (SAM) will handle Intermountain’s patient privacy auditing and incident risk management.
The SAM solution will complement Intermountain Healthcare’s existing systems and help keep the organization on the leading edge of patient privacy.
Intermountain Healthcare, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, comprises 22 hospitals and 185 clinics that serve patients throughout Utah and southeastern Idaho. It is one of the largest healthcare providers in the Intermountain West.
Keenly focused on adhering to HIPAA and other government regulations, the health system wanted to augment patient privacy auditing solutions that monitor access to patient records by its more than 33,500 employees. With the Iatric Systems SAM solution, Intermountain Healthcare will improve its central monitoring capabilities and better analyze data use in Health Information Systems across all facilities.
“Intermountain Healthcare strives to be a patient-privacy leader, and we saw that the SAM solution and a partnership with Iatric Systems would take our organization to the next level in terms of data security and patient privacy,” said Jutta Williams, chief privacy officer for Intermountain Healthcare.
“In addition to the impressive capabilities of the SAM product to monitor and report on employee access to protected health information, we selected Iatric Systems because of its experience with building integrations between health information technologies and for its reputation of becoming a true development partner with customers. The SAM solution and our relationship with Iatric Systems will play a role in the long-term sustainability of our privacy program.”
By proactively monitoring access to sensitive data in near real time, SAM has the ability to detect and provide alerts on privacy breaches, identity theft, snooping, selling of patient information, or other unauthorized activity that may occur within a healthcare enterprise. The SAM solution also has the throughput capabilities necessary to handle considerable quantities of data that organizations like Intermountain Healthcare need to analyze.
“Iatric Systems has more than 23 years of integration experience, which gives us the expertise we need to integrate and correlate audit logs from disparate systems across a large and complex healthcare organization like Intermountain Healthcare,” said James Lawson, senior vice president of software solutions for Iatric Systems.
“Intermountain Healthcare’s focus on stringently protecting patient privacy is a wonderful representation of data security leadership. Iatric Systems is excited to work with Intermountain Healthcare and provide another layer of protection to their already robust security program.”
patient privacy, auditing, incident risk management
