Once you’ve specified the PHI and policies needed to cover it—as well as any other type of sensitive and or/confidential content from structured to unstructured data throughout the organization—dynamic, identity-driven security and compliance solutions provide an answer for protection.

A Belt and Suspenders Approach to Securing PHI
When handling PHI, we suggest a belt and suspenders approach to eliminate risk. First and foremost you need to be able to collaborate on content with PHI, you just need to do so securely. Following are six steps that can be taken to ensure organizations maintain a proactive, layered and preventative risk approach.
(1) Auditing
Automated, constant information scans against policy checkpoints, and corporate policies and documents, enable organizations to assess the levels of sensitive information present and identify compliance issues. It’s also important to look at both data at rest and in motion to capture any problems in real time.

(2) Reporting
With standard and customized reports, compliance and privacy officers gain real-time insight into the status of an operating environment, can identify teams/departments where issues are recurring, and measure progress against compliance objectives over time. Reporting also calls red flags to attention, empowering developers and QA teams with the agility to target and fix issues.

(3) Classifying
Identify sensitive content, at rest or in motion, and dynamically classify the content to identify it as having a certain level of risk.

(4) Restricting
Established business rules should determine the classification of a document, as well as access to it by an individual and/or group, even if a wider audience has access to its physical location. Instituting file level permissions allow administrators to better handle multiple users. Managing file permissions is easier if they are based on the metadata values added at the time of classification.

(5) Encrypting
In addition to securing a document based on its classification, further secure highly sensitive content such as PHI by encrypting it; ensuring that only approved audiences inside or outside of the use environment can access it. In fact, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) dictates as part of the HIPAA Security rule that encryption must be used to protect data at rest and in motion.

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