Health care is an extremely complex system operated by the province and service providers. The province is a specialist in governance and regulation, the service providers are specialists in medicine – neither are experts in privacy or security. Companies such as KI Design are interested in filling the expertise gap within the health care sector by working closely in tandem with health care providers and the Information & Privacy Commissioner to adapt privacy and security solutions that are suitable for their working realities. There is irrevocable value added in having a privacy and security expert working directly with hospitals and other health service providers to assist in refining privacy best practices and implementing a privacy tool that will improve privacy and security outcomes without restricting the workflows of health practitioners.
Mackenzie Health Case Study
Mackenzie Health employs over 450 physicians and 2,600 other staff members, processes nearly 55,000 patient medical record accesses every day, and has just one privacy officer to monitor everything. Mackenzie Health’s privacy needs far outweigh its capacity, so they turned to KI Design for an innovative solution to the need for access auditing.
Section 37(1) of PHIPA outlines the possible uses of personal health information, and these guidelines are based on the purpose underlying the activities. Because the legal framework is centred on purpose, KI Design’s approach is to explain the purpose for accessing a given medical record. The core of this technology is more commonly known as an explanation-based auditing system (EBAS) designed and patented by Dr. Fabbri of Maize Analytics.
To detect unauthorized accesses, KI Design’s solution has the capability of identifying an intelligible connection between the patient and the employee accessing the patient’s records. AI changes the fundamental question underlying auditing tools from “who is accessing patient records without authorization?” to, “for what purpose are hospital staff accessing patient records?” Asking this question helps the technology break down staff workflows and identify common and unique purposes for accessing any given medical record, which are further categorized as either authorized access or unexplained access, which may then flagged as potentially unauthorized behaviour. The technology is able to filter out appropriate accesses, which are usually 98% to 99% of all accesses, so that the Privacy Officer can focus on the much smaller number of unexplained and flagged accesses.