Renown Health is a prominent national healthcare leader in northern Nevada with over 1,200 providers and 375,000 Epic MyChart users. Like many hospitals, Renown Health needed an effective way to efficiently monitor, track, and prioritize thousands of daily PHI accesses across an increasingly complex IT environment.
Renown Health chose Haystack™ iS, a comprehensive patient privacy monitoring solution, to consolidate their thousands of daily PHI accesses into an actionable event list and automate vast segments of their patient privacy auditing. “It used to take a lot of effort to audit patient access. There was no way we could look at the thousands of patient records accessed every day, not to mention the thousands of users,” said Brian Colonna, Director of Compliance. “Haystack has helped us with proactive monitoring, but the feature that’s reduced our workload the most has been AVA.”
Automating Self-Access Review with AVA
While not a HIPAA violation, self-access is against Renown Health’s policy, and time consuming to effectively manage. By implementing AVA, an advanced virtual assistant within Haystack iS, Renown Health automated the information gathering and review of self-access. “Before we had AVA, we would need to connect with users manually for self-access. It was so time consuming to have to follow up with every individual, knowing that these aren’t even real HIPAA violations,” said Nicole Gaarenstroom, Compliance Coordinator for Renown Health. “AVA gathering that information instead has significantly reduced our workload, and lets our team focus on preventing what could be a true OCR breach.” This automation is allowing Renown Health to focus their efforts on real privacy concerns and more strategic initiatives.
Proactive Monitoring and Education Adopting
Haystack iS meant Renown Health could leverage artificial intelligence to scrutinize the vast number of daily patient interactions and user accesses. With AI-driven data analysis and customized event lists, Haystack iS greatly enhanced Renown Health’s ability to identify potentially suspicious activities to proactively prevent a patient privacy breach.
Renown Health is also using the data provided by Haystack iS to identify patterns of increased traffic, and predict when or where additional employee training may be required. “Now we can start getting ahead of things,” said Colonna, “If we see a spike in say family snooping around the holidays, we can schedule educational sessions 30 days or 90 days out to avoid that spike.”
A Testament to Technology
In the evolving healthcare landscape, where the protection of patient information is of utmost importance, Renown Health’s collaboration with iatricSystems stands as a testament to the power of technology in safeguarding patient privacy. Renown Health continues to provide high-quality care to its community, with the assurance that patient privacy remains a top priority. With Haystack iS by their side, they are better equipped to navigate the complexities of healthcare privacy compliance and continue their mission of serving their patients with excellence.
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