One of our customers, a large healthcare system, had some patient information that was regulate by HIPAA made its way onto their Web site. To ensure it didn’t happen again, they enforced data management with BitArmor DataControl.

Doctors at our customer’s hospitals don’t just treat patients, they also teach at universities and at seminars, both domestic and international. Clinical patient information is a critical portion of many presentations, so it has to move outside of their firewall. With so much data moving around so much, it’s not surprising that eventually something ends up where it shouldn’t.

One academic presentation included some x-rays marked with patients’ social security numbers. It was initially posted to a password protected Web site and deleted. But it wasn’t deleted off of a backup Web server, from which it was eventually served to a page that wasn’t protected.

The solution? The healthcare system turned to BitArmor for data management to make sure documents were deleted when they were no longer needed. They were able to assign expiration dates to certain types of files and documents on particular servers, then systematically destroy that data after it expired. That also meant that they reduced their risk of exposing patient information because they had fewer documents to keep
track of.