The HIPPA Privacy Rule

How does HIPPA affect your business?

The Problem for IT departments

The HIPAA Privacy Rule includes data used during the development and testing of healthcare applications. In short, if you are using personal data for such purposes, you are breaking the law.

It is estimated that at least 40% of IT departments do indeed use live customer data as their test data. There may be many instances where test data is taken off site, or printed out (e.g. onto invoices) as part of the test process. The slightest risk of such data getting out into the public domain can leave you greatly exposed. If this happens, even with a high level of corporate security, there remains a risk of accidental – but prosecutable - leakage.

Your Options

However, you can cover your organization against such an exposure by de-identifying the data that is used. The Privacy Rule lists 18 specific identifiers that must be removed or coded for the data to be considered unidentifiable. Therefore, to comply, you must either scramble live data in a way that cannot be deciphered, or create fictitious data.

Fictitious or manually-scrambled data will take many hours to create, and it must be relevant to the application under test, to ensure that the tests will be valid. Furthermore, once the data has been created, it has to be maintained and occasionally refreshed. This is time-consuming, tedious – and hardly a guarantee of security.

The Solution

Fortunately, for iSeries users, there is a simple alternative. Extractor Compliance Edition, Original Software’s market-leading test data creation solution, contains automated data extraction and data scrambling technology that enables fresh, relevant data to be taken from your live database – complete with referential integrity – and then scrambled unidentifiably. That way, you end up with data that remains true to the application, but consists of entirely disjointed and unrecognizable name, address and other personal details. It may not appear as real data any more, but it behaves in exactly the same way. And it satisfies the requirements of the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Furthermore it integrates fully with TestBench for iSeries, the established global market leader for automated testing on the iSeries.

For more information about the HIPAA Privacy Rule, you can visit:

http://www.hipaa.org