Leading Healthcare Organizations Protect Data in the Cloud and On-the-Go with Gazzang

Hartford Hospital, Johnson & Johnson and Quest Diagnostics Among New Customers Using Gazzang to Comply with HIPAA Requirements

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gazzang, Inc., the company securing data in the cloud, today announced ongoing momentum in the healthcare market with customer wins including Children’s Hospital of Boston, echoBase, Hartford Hospital, J7 Group, Johnson & Johnson, MobilePRM.com, Quest Diagnostics, RedBrick Health, RevenueMed, Signature Genomics, Ubiqi Health, UC Irvine Healthcare, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center among others. These organizations are using Gazzang’s ezNcrypt^TM data security solution to encrypt the proliferation of electronic health records, including patient medical histories, doctors’ notes, laboratory results and other sensitive information increasingly stored in the cloud and on healthcare professionals’ mobile devices.

“We wanted to imbed a secure layer to encrypt the sensitive data we are managing for doctors”

According to a recent National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, 48.3 percent of office-based physicians used electronic medical records (EMRs)/electronic health records (EMHs) in 2009, with the number expected to grow significantly. With the increased portability and accessibility of EMRs/EMHs, organizations now face increased challenges to protect this data from unauthorized persons or dishonest users – a key factor in HIPAA compliance requirements.

For Gazzang’s healthcare customers, ezNcrypt provides high performance, transparent data encryption for MySQL and other open source databases without requiring changes to the existing database or application code. This enhances security of sensitive patient information, without impeding the ability to provide time-sensitive – and sometimes life-saving – medical care.

“Despite the healthcare industry’s focus on regulatory compliance, security breaches are still costing organizations upwards of $100,000 per incident,” said Larry Warnock, CEO of Gazzang. “Those figures can be crippling in today’s business climate. Our goal is to help organizations evolve their IT strategy from just keeping out the bad guys to letting more good guys in securely. That means providing greater access to value-added medical services with less risk to patients and professional caregivers.”

Gazzang ezNcrypt uses dual authentication keys and protects critical data from being accessed even by Linux root-level administrators. Additional benefits for healthcare organizations include:

• Fulfills HIPAA compliance requirements related to the access, authentication, storage, auditing, and transmittal of electronic medical records
• Protects against rogue employees
• Alleviates concerns related to storing data in a shared cloud environment
• Protects sensitive or propriety intellectual property
• Requires zero modification to the application or database

Customer Examples:

• Hartford Hospital, the major teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Connecticut Medical School, is developing a system-wide Health Information Exchange based on national standards for healthcare interoperability. “We’ve developed a pilot program with the Department of Social Services to provide this technology as a public service to the citizens of Connecticut, and will soon be rolling it out across our own healthcare network,” said John DeStefano, software engineering manager at Hartford Hospital. “Gazzang provided the perfect security solution that was lightweight and easy to implement, while meeting all of our data encryption needs.”
• echoBase provides a mobile interface that gives clinicians a single, secure way to interact with all electronic patient data at the point of care. “We wanted to imbed a secure layer to encrypt the sensitive data we are managing for doctors,” said Brent Miller, President and Chief Security Officer at echoBase. “Gazzang was the logical choice. It was straightforward and simple to integrate Gazzang with the back-end server and to manage keys to protect patient data, so clinical users never have to worry if the mobile device they’re using is secure, or not.”
• MobilePRM.com provides patient-centric, web-based desktop and mobile services that empower patients to take control of their health, or the healthcare of someone they love. “We leverage open source databases and cloud infrastructure because they provide the flexibility and accessibility required by our eHealth platform consumers,” said Pamela Swingley, President of MobilePRM.com. “That said, you can’t mess around when you’re dealing with sensitive patient records. Gazzang provided us a highly secure, yet easy to integrate encryption solution that gives us the peace of mind we need to take medical relationships mobile.”
• J7 Group provides an easy to use database management system for multi-center research and administration that has been used by major institutions such as University College London's Institute of Child Health, Medical School and Interaction Centre, and the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, Perth, Australia. “Developing an online database management system for international processing of clinical data presents many challenges,” said Richard White, director of J7 Group. “Encryption is a viable option although implementing it natively through MySQL can cause significant performance problems. Gazzang is incredibly easy to use and seamlessly encrypts all data without noticeable performance loss. As a result, we now have a central database hub set up in the US, and are passing all the necessary regulations in the US, EU, Australia and New Zealand.”

For more information on Gazzang’s ezNcrypt solution, visit: http://www.gazzang.com/products/.

About Gazzang

Gazzang makes cloud computing enterprise-ready. Our secure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions help organizations address the inherent risk associated with open source software tools, beginning with data encryption of databases and ultimately migrating all the way up the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). With customers in financial services, healthcare, higher education and technology, we know what it takes to deliver secure, compliant business services in today’s uncertain cloud environments. Gazzang is backed by Austin Ventures, with offices in Houston and Austin, Texas. For more info, visit www.gazzang.com.