HIPAA Data
Masking
INTRODUCTION
This leading health care company works with payers and providers to improve quality and lower costs by managing patient care to the home, They generate over $1 billion in revenue annually and served thousands of members in their homes. Their established IT infrastructure consists of both custom and packaged applications using Oracle and AS400 (i- Series) storing data in DB2 and flat files.
CHALLENGE
- Client is required to protect patient data in compliance with HIPAA guidelines but these regulations provided no firm requirements as to how sensitive data attributes should be masked
- Client needed to mask billions of rows of data on the AS400 platform and Oracle databases
- Client discovered that data flagged for masking was inconsistent and often wrong, requiring further sensitive data analysis and training of masking specialists
SOLUTION
The Axis Data Privacy Services team was engaged to mask a complex legacy system in a very short amount of time to meet aggressive business deadlines.
Results
The Axis Data Services team delivered results:
- Masked personal health information (PHI) identified in all database schemas and files to comply with HIPAA regulations and application requirements
- Used an innovative masking strategy to improve performance and avoid key field limitations on AS400
- Profiled and masked 301 tables and files with PHI data in various formats including delimited, fixed- width/positional, and Excel Masked billions of rows of data across multiple, different technologies Met aggressive masking deadline and prevented interruption to client’s test team
- Delivered the project on time and within budget including documentation of best practices and custom job configurations required for the client information security and application teams to support masking moving forward
Axis masked billions of rows of data from a legacy AS400 running Oracle and met the client’s agressive timeline
