"...No other solution on the market can capture email data and provide full fidelity the way Mimosa NearPoint can with its revolutionary approach to archiving…Mimosa NearPoint was the natural choice to add to our state-of-the art healthcare computing environment."
— Tom Pacek, AVP of Technology, Virtua Health
Healthcare organizations – hospitals and healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies (payers / health plans) – face additional challenges with managing user-generated content due to a high level of regulatory compliance and high rates of litigation. As a healthcare organization, you must follow strict privacy guidelines regarding the disclosure of identifiable patient information, while still needing to disclose relevant information in response to litigation. In the healthcare industry, there is constant litigation around issues such as insurance reimbursement and medical malpractice. With so much user-generated content related to patient treatment, insurance payments, and other operations, organizations need to be ready to discovery and produce this information quickly and without incurring exorbitant costs.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has very specific rules to cover any type of record that contains Protected Health Information (PHI). For healthcare organizations, HIPAA compliance is a top priority. When it comes to high-volume, user-generated content like email, free-range files, and SharePoint content, it is difficult to ensure that the organization can discover patient data and regulate where that data goes – it’s about making the data portable to other systems as needed. As a result, centralized management of all this data becomes critical.
While HIPAA tends to dominate the headlines, there are other compliance challenges that drive the need for archiving. Many healthcare organizations, e.g. hospitals, take public bonds to finance construction or other development initiatives; as such, these organizations are subject to compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). This requires the ability to quickly turn over any potentially relevant information to auditors or regulators should the need arise.
By being proactive and having an integrated archiving solution in place, healthcare organizations can ensure a comprehensive and efficient methodology for finding all responsive email, free-range files, and SharePoint content. This allows for reduced costs and a much better ability to sleep at night.
While regulatory compliance is top-of-mind for healthcare executives, eDiscovery may be an even bigger headache. As mentioned previously, organizations must be able to quickly discover and produce large amounts of information in response to litigation or regulatory investigations – while also guarding patient confidentiality along the way. For an organization without email archiving in place, this means the arduous task of searching old messaging back-up tapes becomes a necessity.
Recovering email from tape is nearly an impossible task for several reasons. First of all, unless old back-up tapes are properly labeled and stored they may be difficult to find and may not be in the best condition. A back-up tape is normally restored to a recovery server, not a production server, which is not available to all organizations. The tapes are likely based on different versions of the message server application and this requires the recovery server be loaded with the matching operating system (OS). Once tapes are restored, their content must be searched and that is limited by the native messaging search tools. A common practice is to print out email for manual review.
The bottom line is that back-up tapes are an expensive and impractical method of preserving email for archival. The technical difficulties and time necessary to search and retrieve historical email stored on back-up tapes are just too great to make this method feasible/practical. Without archiving, eDiscovery can be painful, expensive, and simply not reliable.
The Mimosa NearPoint™ platform for email, file system, and SharePoint archiving provides a solid foundation to build strong compliance and eDiscovery efforts. Specifically, NearPoint offers:
For those organizations not needing to change retention periods as they evolve, NearPoint is the ONLY choice. With NearPoint customers are able to lengthen and shorten retention periods as organizational policies mature without having to re-archive the content. NearPoint also provides the capability to extend retention periods in the result of investigatory action or litigation. Because NearPoint is an integrated archive for all user-generated content (email, attachments, file system content, instant messages, etc), these legal holds are universally applied. For example, all content related to a given custodian (employee) in a matter can be placed on hold in one simple step, regardless of where the content originated.
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