Fortanix Shows How to Accelerate Healthcare Compliance Through Data Security at HIMSS 23

As technology continues to advance, the healthcare industry has witnessed a rapid digital transformation. Electronic health records (EHRs), telemedicine, and connected medical devices have become essential tools to improve patient care and user experience.

However, this advancement brings unprecedented challenges; the healthcare industry is a prime target for cyber attacks, with data breaches becoming increasingly common.

Data privacy and security regulations such as EU GDPR, HIPAA, and HITECH help protect private healthcare records and hold organizations accountable to ensure they apply thorough measures.

Data encryption is an incredibly effective tool to address compliance, but organizations must have a holistic approach to ensure it doesn’t inhibit operations. 

Meanwhile, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken a great leap in recent years to detect patterns in large datasets that otherwise go undetected.

In the medical world, this is used to analyze X-ray photos, or other large datasets to analyze symptoms individual doctor visits would not reveal.

This involves sharing data with several third parties, which obviously becomes complex when balancing these innovations with the regulations that protect patient data.   

Fortanix is excited to show its data security solutions at HIMSS 2023 in Chicago. Check us out at booth #5214 to learn how we help streamline your cryptographic operations, accelerate secure data sharing, and a preview of an industry-first solution to secure data search in encrypted data. 

We will host short theater sessions throughout the day with some of our partners, including Beekeeper AI, Imperva, Microsoft, Intel, and Bosch AIShield.

The sessions provide a great overview of the combined value for healthcare organizations. Each session, we give away a Nintendo Switch, so if you attend HIMSS, be sure to come by and learn more! 

We have product experts ready to meet with you at the show. As a bonus for meeting with us, you will receive a pair of Air Pods! 

The Need for Pervasive Encryption in Healthcare 

The healthcare industry handles vast amounts of sensitive patient data, including Protected health information (PHI) and electronic health records (EHRs), which contain a wealth of personal and medical information, including patients' names, addresses, medical history, diagnoses, and treatment plans.

This data is highly valuable and sought after by cybercriminals who can exploit it for financial gain, identity theft, insurance fraud, and other malicious purposes.  

Healthcare data breaches can result in severe consequences, including financial losses, damage to reputation, legal liabilities, and, most importantly, compromising patient privacy and trust. 

Data encryption is crucial in safeguarding healthcare data from unauthorized access and protecting it from cyber threats and complying with regulatory requirements, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States.

It is a very effective complement to traditional infrastructure security solutions, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, endpoint detection, and more.

Healthcare organizations spend billions of dollars on these solutions; however, data breaches still happen all too frequently.  

Encryption is the process of converting data into a code or cipher to make it unreadable to unauthorized parties. It uses cryptographic algorithms and keys to secure data, ensuring that only authorized parties with the correct decryption key can access and read the data.

With encryption, even if data is intercepted or stolen by cybercriminals, it is useless to them. 

However, this garbled data is also useless to AI or other data analytics tools. Luckily, Format-Preserving Encryption (FPE), also frequently referred to as tokenization, provides an answer.

This technology ensures that, for example, a social security number still looks like one, it is just not the actual original value. For many mobile/web applications, this is enough.

Think, for example, of a customer representative that needs to verify just the last portion of a social security number for verification. 

The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard helps to simplify the sharing of EHR, and many healthcare organizations try to follow it. However, the FHIR standard does not facilitate any measure that ensures the transported data remains secure.

Encrypting sensitive data such as PHI and EHR enables the safe sharing of such data with third parties, while the data owner remains in control of the encryption keys and, therefore, the access to this data, wherever it may travel. 

Simplifying Cryptography and Key Management with Fortanix Data Security Manager (DSM) 

While the importance of data security and encryption in healthcare is evident, implementing and managing encryption can be complex and challenging for healthcare organizations.

Cryptography involves using cryptographic algorithms and keys, which need to be carefully managed and securely stored to ensure the security of sensitive data.

Managing cryptographic keys across their lifecycle, including generation, distribution, storage, and revocation, becomes complex as the number of keys grows, and keys are stored in different key management systems across different datacenters and cloud platforms. 

To address these challenges, Fortanix offers a unified modern platform that simplifies cryptography and key management for healthcare organizations.

Fortanix Data Security Manager streamlines the encryption process and makes it easier for healthcare organizations to implement and manage data security measures effectively across hybrid and multicloud environments. 

Preview: Confidential Data Search 

Fortanix will show a preview demo of an industry-first solution to a well-known problem in healthcare data analytics: To perform granular and secure search operations in encrypted complex data. 

Current solutions that enable secure searches of encrypted data in are impractical for general adoption in data-mining operations as they can be 1,000 to 1,000,000 times slower than searching in standard databases.

Besides the computational demands, these solutions provide very limited scope of query granularity, further limiting their applicability.  

Fortanix Confidential Data Search enables organizations to accelerate their data-driven initiatives with: 

• Better performance and proven technologies 
• Granular data search on complex data sets  
• Lower TCO  

During the HIMSS event, check out a sneak-peek into the industry-first solution that provides a full scope of SQL queries on databases protected by Microsoft Azure Container Instances (ACI). 

We are looking forward to talking to you at HIMSS!