Concept Searching Announces Availability of Protected Health Information (PHI) Discovery Software

Nov. 18, 2008 - PRLog -- Concept Searching, developers of concept based search, automatic classification, semantic metadata generation, and taxonomy management software have announced the availability of PHIdiscovery, a solution that identifies Protected Health Information (PHI) for healthcare entities.

Healthcare entities are unique in that complex data flows are routinely communicated to a wide variety of organizations such as pharmacies, laboratories, insurers, and government benefiting agencies.  In 2007, third party breaches were up by 40% and the average cost per exposed record was $231.00.  Overall the increase of medical data breaches is on the rise.  With online medical records becoming the norm instead of the exception, healthcare providers and hospitals may be facing data breach exposures that can jeopardize patient privacy.  Coupled with the impact of new and existing laws healthcare organizations can face fines, sanctions and potentially subject the organization to litigation for failure to protect patient data.  

PHIdiscovery is a unique solution that helps healthcare organizations manage the risk associated with PHI that may be located across diverse repositories.  The innovative technology identifies content through advanced meta-tagging and automatic classification features.  As content is created or ingested, PHI is automatically identified and classified to a folder for security and review procedures.  Fully customizable, the organization can define PHI according to their specific requirements and needs.  Types of PHI can include HIPAA descriptors or other descriptors unique to the organization.  Features include automatic metadata tagging and classification of PHI based upon its presence within content.  Once identified PHI is automatically aggregated into a central location for review and disposition.  PHI can be identified from a wide variety of data repositories as well as scanned documents and forms.  

“Although HIPAA compliance has been a critical issue for healthcare organizations since 1996, civil causes of action are expected to dramatically rise and new requirements such as the Red Flag rules implemented by the Federal Trade Commission has resulted in additional pressure for healthcare entities to protect not only the privacy of their patients but also protect the organization,” said Martin Garland, President of Concept Searching, Inc.  “PHIdiscovery can identify potential exposures that the organization may not even know of and enable the appropriate disposition of the data.”

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Founded in 2002, Concept Searching’s software products deliver advanced search, auto-classification, taxonomy management and advanced metadata tagging solutions from the desktop to the enterprise. Concept Searching is the only statistical metadata generation and classification software company in the world that uses concept extraction and compound term processing to significantly improve access to unstructured information. Headquartered in the U.K. with offices in the U.S. and South Africa, Concept Searching solves the problem of finding, organizing, and managing information capital. For more information about Concept Searching’s solutions and technologies please visit www.conceptsearching.com.