Healthcare providers need to have quick access to patient data. However, maintaining a secure exchange of protected health information (PHI) in real time requires protection from breaches to ensure increased patient safety and better patient outcomes while helping lower the risks and costs.
Many regulations exist to protect the exchange of patient information. The various compliances and legal frameworks under the Health Information Exchange (HIE) exist to reduce costs for all within the healthcare system, including patients, providers, and insurers. They aim to help reduce risks, errors, and testing duplications while improving outcomes.
Sadly, some providers often don’t have access to PHI, disrupting the workflow of the patient and increasing their risk and costs. Unfortunately, the more copies of treatments and medications exist for each patient, the more the potential for errors and data leaks increases.
EnduraData’s EDpCloud provides bidirectional file replication that allows the automatic and secure synchronization of healthcare information data. It can do this between heterogeneous systems, remote locations, and all clouds.
Factors Impeding PHI Sharing
Several factors can impede the sharing of PHI, sometimes even between healthcare providers working within the same hospital. These can include a system requiring multiple consents, using various systems, non-interoperability, and regulations.
Despite federal and state efforts to improve interoperability, the exchange of information still falls short of expectations between providers, meaning that costs remain high and patients’ lives are still at risk.
As seen in this case study on the complications faced by Minnesota’s health providers in 2015, EnduraData’s EDpCloud helped solve HIE by improving workflows and data synchronization.
- El Haddi, CTO and Founder of EnduraData and EDpCloud’s architect, says, “Decision-making in healthcare relies heavily on data sharing on health information from multiple providers. EDpCloud makes this exchange in real-time.” He adds, “It also does this securely and automatically, reducing costs, risks, and errors. Most importantly, it improves the quality of patient care.”
Securing the Exchange of PHI with EDpCloud
Updating and moving millions of files between systems in several locations and providers is a real challenge. However, these environments usually also have a tiny window of maintenance downtime.
When needing to replicate and synchronize PHI securely on several central operating systems, including Linux, Windows, Mac, etc., EDpCloud implementation allows for any configuration to meet the needs of multi-directional replication for sophisticated HIE.
Besides refined replication, a system providing file compression and security needs to understand which files it can compress. Since not all medical images compress well, EDpCloud adapts to compression levels by adapting the knowledge it learns over time on a system.
Furthermore, data encryption remains vital during transit and at rest, depending on the system required. Privacy and security remain crucial when sending and receiving medical information. The system helps ensure the secure exchange of PHI by requiring multiple access control layers, which only allow authorized and authenticated people to move and access information.
Healthcare providers can choose whether they want their operating systems to operate in real-time, on-demand, or scheduled mode, always ensuring fast transfer speeds and reduced vulnerabilities.
Moreover, whether the data needs to move internally or externally and between various sites, systems, and networks, EDpCLoud configurations allow post and preprocessing hooks. Finally, it can read all file formats, reducing the need to restore unless required, and provides for extensive history tracking to facilitate audits.
These are a few ways that EnduraData’s EDpCloud can help healthcare providers meet the challenges of HIE workflows and data synchronization to help lower their risks and costs.
Bottom Line
The healthcare industry remains most vulnerable to data theft thanks to the constant need to replicate and move sensitive information between providers and sites. EnduraData recognizes that data is the new currency of this century and has created the solution for heavily data-dependent organizations like health care, finance, etc.
Founded in 2006, EnduraData solves the most pressing need of our time, fast data delivery with data protection. The system allows for configurations that provide access to a secure, fast, reliable, cross-platform data synchronization and backup that secures the exchange of protected health information, lowering the risks and costs across all players in the industry.
