Data Privacy for Health
and Pharmaceutical
Industries
Discover Okera’s Data Privacy
Solutions for Healthcare
Data access teams in healthcare and pharma struggle to secure their data – knowing what sensitive data exists in their data lake and who is accessing it, and providing fine-grained access control to data analysts and data scientists while guarding confidential personal health information in accordance with HIPAA. This is where Okera comes in, having secured data access for large F500 healthcare and pharma companies.
What Is Data Privacy in Healthcare?
Trust and confidentiality are critical when it comes to healthcare data. Patients provide medical establishments with highly sensitive personal information that, if distributed without their consent, could lead to serious consequences and loss of trust for the patient, and potential legal action toward the medical establishment. Information that is commonly breached includes:
- Medical services provided
- Medical history, including medications taken
- Patients’ name and address
- The psychological or mental conditions of a patient
- Patients’ social security number and birthdate
Why Privacy Is Important in Health Data
As the healthcare industry becomes increasingly digital, the opportunity for data breaches to occur rises. Breaches can and do happen. They take the form of email hacks, unauthorized disclosure or access to medical records or emails, network server hacks, and theft. When breaches occur, patients potentially suffer, business must often come to a halt, and organizations face serious consequences for violating HIPAA regulations and not properly securing protected health information information (PHI).
How to Ensure Data Privacy in Healthcare
When it comes to data governance in healthcare, there must be a balance between healthcare data privacy and utility. Sensitive data must be protected, but it must also be accessible and usable for important analytic use cases, like accelerating the speed of drug discovery.
Securing access to PHI requires a system that includes the following:
- Fine-grained access control at the column, row, and cell level with access control policies applied dynamically
- Data obfuscation including tokenization and masking
- Faster data discovery with built-in automated crawling
- Integration with Active Directory to ensure users can only see approved data
- Detailed visibility and audit trail into data lake usage, especially for sensitive data, to prove compliance with data privacy regulations
How Okera Helps Healthcare Organizations
Okera helps healthcare organizations protect clinical data and minimize the risk of data misuse while still allowing ways for approved parties to effectively analyze and use health data insights. Okera provides:
- De-identification
- Auditing capabilities
- Centralized policy management
- Dynamic data masking and tokenization
- Reporting on sensitive data access
What to Read Next
Learn more about Okera’s AI-centric data access governance solution
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