University of Texas Addresses HIPAA

摘要

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, formed in 1972, is a component of the University of Texas System that offers public health services and medical schools including nursing, molecular medicine, dental, health IT, and psychiatrics. The HSC network services group maintains file, e-mail, file, networking, application and storage services for general public health services administration and medical schools. The health service organizations' storage infrastructure is SAN-based to provide for greater capacity and availability for applications spanning administrative, billing and medical records―all of which contain Private Health Information (PHI). Typically, protecting PHI to meet Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance requires classifying processes and data, as well as assuring the protection of the front-end and back-end infrastructure supporting access to PHI. HIPAA Technical Safeguards Section 164.312 suggests encryption as a means to protect PHI. Essentially, encryption conceals the sensitive identifiable information―thereby protecting PHI data. To that end, the UT Health Science Center at Houston explored options to encrypt sensitive stored data and employed CryptoStor―a storage security appliance from a comparatively new company, NeoScale.