The leader in test data management solutions for healthcare firms
The healthcare regulatory overview
Grid-Tools has experience in working with some of the top healthcare institutions internationally on test data management initiatives. With Grid-Tools, organizations are able to implement best practice techniques, save time and money and develop better testing and development results and standards. Grid-Tools’ success with healthcare organizations stems from a unique approach, a niche solution and an unparalleled track-record.
Grid-Tools also have also partnered with HIPAA QA, offering HIPAAdvanced™ - a managed service for test data analysis, creation and conversion for all HIPAA testing requirements. It utilizes Grid-Tools sophisticated solutions and data inheritance processes to deliver PHI secure, robust test data. This service includes all X12N transaction sets, data relationships, legacy data formats and HIPAA 5010 file interdependencies for full lifecycle testing. This best-in-class industry offering combines decades of testing and test data expertise with leading data masking, scrubbing and obfuscation techniques for PHI. HIPAAdvanced™ services are unique in the industry and provide end-to-end test data management for all phases of testing.
Click here to see a list of test files for HIPAA 4010A to 5010 conversions.
Healthcare service providers have increased their focus on risk management in recent years due to regulatory, market and competitive pressures. Likewise, recent data breaches globally have caused a boost in CEO awareness, increasing the risks to corporate branding and reputation. The combination of these pressures have recently caused a shift in emphasis and is now being taken seriously with enhanced data security across the board.
In the last few years, new regulatory initiatives internationally have consistently evolved. While the healthcare industry has made strides in protecting sensitive patient records, as rules and standards continue to change and evolve, healthcare organizations must remain vigilant. Data management is becoming increasingly complex globally, and new industry standards related to healthcare data continue to emerge. Healthcare organizations need to react quickly to changes and increase their compliance monitoring and enforcement measures.
Enforcing compliance measures and standards creates a strain on current practices. Initiatives to achieve compliance must be enforced, but the organization must also maintain the ability to share, integrate and manipulate enterprise data in multiple formats for business purposes. Many healthcare organizations are looking for solutions.
Grid-Tools offer the flexibility of leveraging production-like data for effective testing, development, training and QA environments.In every instance, Grid-Tools strive to reduce complexity, reduce test cycles, maintain compliance standards and increase the quality of the data that is being used. The end objective is to change the overall test data management strategy by offering best practice processes and solutions.
The Privacy Rule at 164.502 (b)(1) of the HIPAA regulation states, "When using or disclosing protected health information or when requesting protected health information from another covered entity, a covered entity must make reasonable efforts to limit protected health information to the minimum necessary to accomplish the intended purpose of the use, disclosure, or request."
Thus, in using "test" data or sending test data to another covered entity, the identity of the individual is not necessary to use.Care should be taken to de-identify the data so that individuals identities are not revealed to program testers or other test staff.
Delivering compliant, flexible and reusable data
Your organization’s test data management initiatives are likely to focus on the generation or creation of compliant test or development data, and the management of this data. Many healthcare organizations are looking to share and manipulate production-like data across their test and development teams in highly complex environments.
Due to recent regulatory initiatives globally, organizations are unable to use live data in the creation of non-production environments. Likewise, in order to reduce complexity, reduce storage costs and increase productivity, many organizations are looking for alternatives to using and manipulating copies of large production databases in non-production environments.
Grid-Tools offer the flexibility of creating data which models the referential and relational integrity of production environments, creating referentially correct, secure subset databases or masks and anonymizes production data; providing your organization with rich, compliant data sets. The result is less data, but more variety.
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