Healthcare providers have an ethical responsibility to preserve the confidentiality and privacy of patient records. Today, this commitment has been reinforced by statutory and regulatory frameworks directing how electronic communications and records are handled. Healthcare providers now have an obligation not only to meet the highest standards in patient information confidentiality and security, but also to show that they are meeting these standards. Regulations, such as HIPAA, have forced healthcare institutions to gain control of their electronic communications, especially with regard to privacy and confidentiality. Recent developments on the legal landscape confirm that healthcare organizations need to make sure their policy is what drives their technology decisions and not the opposite. 

Regulatory Compliance transmitting and retaining email

• HIPAA Compliance - Legislation, such as HIPAA, affects the way healthcare data can be transferred and sets standards for certain types of PHI (Personal Health Information). With M+Guardian, you can meet compliance requirements with policy-based control of information transfer and content analysis to identify social security numbers or unique number sets, such as patient admission numbers or prescriptions.
• Protecting the Privacy and Confidentiality of Patient Information - Ensure that confidentiality is guaranteed and your organization's reputation is protected by enforcing strict policies for handling patient records and preventing users from receiving private information in error. M+Guardian allows you to establish specific policies that allow only a defined set of email users or special email user groups to send and receive patient records and private information.

• Archiving Email Records - Archiving email is a major concern for healthcare organizations which need an up-to-date email retention system in place to address the needs for electronic legal discovery and content management. GWArchive automatically archives and retains all email for specified periods, storing it in a secure yet accessible standards-based searchable format. You can automatically migrate older archives to cheaper storage or have them automatically deleted once the retention period has expired.
• eDiscovery - As dependence on email continues to grow, so has the role it plays in litigation. Email is now just as likely to be requested for legal discovery as are paper-based records. You need tools to deal with eDiscovery requests when they happen and to protect your organization before they happen. GWArchive offers robust search engine capabilities to search, retrieve, export, and securely store electronic records requested in litigation on portable media for easy access and quick information review.

policy-based Secure transmission of electronic communication

• Intelligent Spam and Virus Filtering - Empower your end users to control the email they receive while enforcing policies that will ensure that your organization's reputation remains intact and your collaboration system doesn't get bogged down by unwanted onslaughts of spam and other threats without having to worry about false positives. M+Guardian's intelligent spam and AV engines are always current because they are adaptive to new categories of internet-borne risks and are automatically updated without human intervention.
• Encryption - Secure, encrypted email is a key requirement for the healthcare sector as it offers the ability to share confidential information with approved external agencies. M+Guardian offers an optional encryption module for simple, easy-to-use secure transmission of PHI.
• Identity-Based Management - Manage your policies directly with Novell eDirectory, LDAP, or Active Directory to control email and archive access policies for groups, individuals, or across the entire organization. A policy-driven engine helps you enforce your epolicies seamlessly and consistently with the necessary granularity that is crucial for healthcare organizations. 

Enterprise-Class collaboration with M+ extensible platform

• High Availability & Performance - Healthcare organizations require reliable, enterprise-class redundancy and performance. Clustering, load balancing, multi-threaded scanning, and optimized message store allow our solutions to deliver high availability and unsurpassed performance. For you, it means providing high levels of service to the public and other agencies with no downtime. Our solutions offer enterprise-level performance with the necessary level of built-in fault tolerance to provide improved data availability and simplified management of rapidly growing systems.
• Scalability - Our software is routinely used by organizations with 100 or 100,000+ users. It is designed for enterprise-scale deployments on multiple servers in various geographic locations while centrally managed through a platform-independent web-based interface. Scalability means that our solutions can be deployed to meet the requirements of even the largest healthcare organizations.
  
• Reporting & Monitoring - Our solutions deliver easy to understand operational and management reports in both tabular and graphical format. Our real-time monitoring service proactively eliminates unexpected server and service failures by monitoring and analyzing specific performance values. Alerts, warnings and long-term trends are used to plan, predict, and respond to failure.

More

• More Information - This is just the tip of the iceberg as to how our solutions can be applied in the healthcare sector. To discuss how we can help with the specific requirements of your organization, please speak with an Expert.