Data-driven patient care is more than just storing records. It is alson’t merely a regulatory necessity. Rather, ensuring confidentiality throughout the movement ensures operational efficiency at the front end.

In Harvard Business Review’s landmark survey, 94% of respondents confirmed that a data-driven approach could produce newer opportunities for doctors to deliver personalized patient care. However, it only requires fully secured and qualified data in the landscape.

Despite hospitals implementing various masking strategies through their technology partners, they have yet to realize the benefits fully. Traditional methods are mostly static, which leaves less room for real-time processing, thereby causing uncertainty in results and costs.

K2view is changing this. Alongside protecting sensitive patient information, the tool ensures that it is fully functional and useful for analytics, testing, and other operational purposes. It handles both structured and unstructured data, offers an exclusive entity-based dynamic masking, and supports multiple data sources.

Why does K2view entity-based masking outperform traditional masking?

Traditional masking techniques are bound by one-time processing. Such a static approach creates loopholes in data security because there’s no possibility of real-time resolution. That’s where dynamic data masking makes all the difference. As soon as the data is accessed, it is masked on the go, thereby minimizing the risks of exposure.

K2view’s popular entity-based masking maintains referential integrity, meaning it retains the logical relationships. This helps fetch accurate analytics without compromising data confidentiality. For the healthcare industry, which is sitting on goldmine of data, this is helpful in several ways such as:

Ensures the end-to-end protection of patient data from threats (both internal and external) by masking sensitive information across the system landscape, including production and testing environments.

Since it supports a wide range of data sources, it protects all data types stored in databases, files, cloud environments or hybrid setups.

K2view simplifies compliance with stringent regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, and others by automatically identifying and masking PII and PHI data sets.

Ultimately, K2view minimizes the risk of data branches ensuring application development, testing, and third-party integrations, which requires anonymized yet realistically actionable data.

Step-by-step working of K2view masking

Let’s understand working with a real-life use case example of a healthcare system. The K2view data masking tool is categorized into:
1. Data Discovery and Classification:

The K2view data platform is integrated with the hospital’s electronic health record (EHR) system.

Using ML algorithms, K2view scans the EHR database to identify and classify sensitive data such as patient names, social security numbers, medical records, and billing information.

At this step, the platform catalogues all the sensitive data elements for masking.

2. Masking Configuration:

After successful data identification, the platform is configured and the masking rules are applied.

Based on the dynamic requirements, masking can be deterministic (consistent results) and non-deterministic (varying results).

For example, patient names may be masked to initials (e.g., “John Doe” to “J*** D**”) and social security numbers to partial obfuscation (e.g., “123-45-6789” to “XXX-XX-6789”).

3. Real-Time Masking Implementation:

As briefed above, the data is masked on the go as soon as it enters the system.

The data is dynamically masked when a healthcare provider accesses a patient’s record. The provider sees the masked data, ensuring sensitive information is not exposed.

This ensures immediate data protection during its usage without altering the original data.

4. Batch Processing for Data at Rest:

K2View’s batch processing efficiently handles large volumes of data at scheduled intervals.

This means that, at the end of each day or as decided, a batch job masks any new data sets added or updated in the records.

This ensures that data at rest is also protected, complementing real-time masking.

5. Audit and Compliance Tracking:

The platform provides a comprehensive historical trail for auditing of all access and masking activities. This is done through automatic logging.

Automated and accurate report generation of all masking activities to ensure regulatory compliance with HIPAA, GDPR and others.

In case of a compliance audit, the hospital can demonstrate adherence to data privacy regulations by providing these detailed reports.

What you see below is a glimpse of the K2TDM dashboard.
You can access the product tour here.

Real-time data masking in healthcare

Since the healthcare environment usually processes and updates large volumes of critical data in real-time, K2view ’a masking has a greater role here. Such a real-time capability ensures that thre sensitive data is masked at the moment of access, thereby preventing any exposure of unmasked data. It matters because maintaining the privacy of data while ensuring day-to-day operations without compromising performance could overhaul the healthcare landscape. Masking in real time enables healthcare providers to access and share data securely, facilitating better patient care and collaboration among medical professionals

Case Studies: K2view in Healthcare

As a market leader in data products and management, K2view is a game-changer solution for the healthcare industry. Their work in the sector includes but is not limited to:

Protecting Patient Information A major healthcare provider used K2view’s data masking to secure patient records, ensuring only authorized access and compliance with regulatory requirements.

Improving Data Accessibility K2view’s dynamic data masking allowed secure data sharing among healthcare providers for research and collaboration without exposing sensitive information, enhancing both accessibility and privacy.

Compliance with Healthcare Regulations K2view helped a healthcare organization meet HIPAA and other regulations by anonymizing sensitive data, protecting patient information, and avoiding penalties for non-compliance.

It is more than just about hiding information

The lasting impact of data masking results in the efficiency of healthcare services. Protected data ensures trusted data, and trusted data ensures accurate analytics. This enables healthcare professionals to collaborate seamlessly among stakeholders, speeding up clinical trials and enhancing patient care. With products like K2view, the healthcare industry is taking a leap in data-driven decision-making while safeguarding patients’ rights at the same time.