GlobalSign® Solutions

The Healthcare industry in particular is a challenging environment to provide efficient security. Healthcare organisations face increasing pressures to be able to meet strict budget, regulations, and ensure that optimum patient care is achieved. In order to reduce the gap between responding to deliver optimum patient care and strict budgets, efficient and effective processes are relied upon. On top of that, healthcare organisations also confront problems with regards to meeting standards, gaining competitive leadership, changing regulations, and upholding patient information as strictly confidential.

Organization Drivers
Healthcare organisations are very paper sensitive and restricted when it comes to budget. To achieve better efficiency, one proposed solution is to automate the business processes, streamline all communications, and reduce the overall volume of paperwork. The result, healthcare organisations now aim for patient satisfaction levels to go up while ensuring that the privacy and information of the patient is kept confidential and secure.

With automation, healthcare organisations now need to ensure that their network infrastructure is secured from prying eyes. Patients are now more conscious regarding the protection of their personal data even more so when it comes to healthcare organisations that hold highly confidential details of a person's medical status.

Regulatory Compliance
Each and every healthcare organisation is required to comply with several Government sanctioned regulations with regards to security of networks, information, and documentation. This includes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Food and Drug Administration Code of Federal Regulations (FDA CFR). Therefore, it is very important that these healthcare organisations are equipped with the necessary security policies to be able to meet these firm regulations.

HIPAA 1996 - has set the national standards with regards to the security and privacy of medical records which is designed to improve the overall efficiency of the healthcare system though encouraging the widespread use of electronic data interchange than using paper-based methods. HIPAA requires that the healthcare organisations conduct thorough IT risk management and assessment as well as developing and implementing a plan to improve and maintain security.

FDA 21 CFR Part 11 1997 - clearly defines the main principle in which electronic records and digital signatures are to be considered as reliable, trustworthy, and are equivalent to paper records. These standards for use of digital signatures and electronic records were introduced as a response to the soaring costs in managing the storage, distribution, and retrieval of records particularly within the healthcare industry in which budget can be allocated to more beneficial resources. In addition to this, security concerns that surround wet ink signatures have emerged since it became apparent that these signatures, including the actual content they were assigned to, can be easily falsified.

SOX 2002 - this requires that publicly listed companies and businesses maintain and implement increased controls when it comes to financial reporting processes as a response to serious accounting scandals in the past. Public organisations should provide an annual internal control report that states the responsibility of management for maintaining and establishing a sufficient internal control structure as well as procedures for financial reporting.