The 10 Most Trusted Healthcare IT Security Solution Providers 2018 Final file Healthcare IT optimize | Page 37

Data Cryptology
P
ersonal Health Records (PHR)
security is the new ladder that
many security technologies are
trying to climb. One of the reasons that
healthcare providers are working
towards this is that they are willing to
secure their and patients’ data. The
other reason is that is a requirement
imposed by the legislations such as
HIPAA, HITECH, etc. which are to be
obliged to, to avoid penalties.
Tokenization and encryption are two of
the technologies used to safeguard
information. Both of these are critical
to an organization to avoid breaches.
Even then the dilemma of encryption
versus tokenization does exist.
In simple words, encryption is masking
of critical information. At one end, the
data is encrypted, like a code, and then
sent over to the other end. Only the
user at this end has the key to decrypt
the already encrypted data, and no
other party can decode it. This key can
be given to more than one end user to
facilitate broadcast of information to
authorized group of people. This
process helps in avoiding interference
of any third party and reduces the risk
of data theft or unwanted data
modification.
In tokenization, the data is protected
using tokens. Small chunks of data are
assigned particular tokens, which point
to the location where this data is
stored. Giving the tokens to selective
users allow them to access data with
ease and security. Once intercepted,
these tokens are rendered useless and
cannot help in accessing the real
information. The benefit of tokens over
encryption keys is that the tokens are
easy to handle, they are one time
generated codes and hence, do not
compromise real data.
Forms of Encryption
The mathematically encoded data
using encryption is called ‘Cipher’ and
the key used to decode the cipher is
| September 2018 |
35