Healthcare & Private Data
From hospitals and insurance providers to specialty clinics and research labs, organizations manage massive volumes of protected health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, and insurance records. Compliance with HIPAA, HITECH, PCI-DSS, and a growing set of state and global privacy regulations is not optional. Patients and regulators expect this information to be handled with care, confidentiality, and transparency.
“With Spirion, we don’t just comply with HIPAA—we understand and control our data environment in ways we never could before.”
-Director of Information Security, Regional Health System
Challenge
Healthcare organizations are under constant pressure to protect patient data while delivering fast, connected, and collaborative care. But as digital records expand across EMRs, mobile devices, telehealth systems, and third-party partners, so does the risk of breach, data sprawl, and non-compliance.
The reality is that sensitive data often exists outside centralized systems—in spreadsheets, email attachments, staff laptops, and cloud shares—making it difficult to track or protect. Over-permissive access controls, outdated data retention practices, and limited visibility into endpoint data introduce vulnerabilities that can lead to compliance violations or identity theft.
At the same time, healthcare remains a top target for cyberattacks. Ransomware groups, insider threats, and phishing campaigns often exploit vulnerabilities in unmonitored data environments. A single breach can compromise thousands of records, disrupt care delivery, and result in millions of dollars in fines and remediation costs.
Figure 1: Cyberattacks on healthcare compromise data and care.
Solution
To manage these evolving risks, healthcare organizations rely on Spirion’s Sensitive Data Platform (SDP)—a purpose-built solution designed to provide proactive discovery, classification, remediation, and compliance support across hybrid IT environments.
Discover
Spirion locates sensitive data with 98.5% accuracy across EMRs, file shares, endpoint devices, cloud repositories, and legacy systems. Its advanced content-aware scanning identifies PHI, PII, financial data, and other sensitive fields, even in unstructured formats, such as scanned forms or clinician notes.
Classify
Once discovered, data is automatically and persistently classified based on HIPAA, HITECH, PCI-DSS, and organizational policies. Spirion’s dynamic tagging system ensures every record is accurately labeled, prioritized, and aligned with appropriate privacy actions.
Understand
Dashboards provide insight into the sensitive data landscape, showing where risk lives, how it’s being accessed, and what actions are required. Teams can quickly identify vulnerabilities, overexposed files, and compliance gaps.
Control
With Spirion’s remediation playbooks, organizations can automate data protection actions, including redaction, quarantine, encryption, and access revocation. These actions are executed consistently across systems, reducing response times and human error.
Comply
Spirion simplifies compliance with HIPAA and other healthcare privacy mandates through continuous monitoring, audit-ready reporting, and alerting on data retention violations, access anomalies, and policy conflicts.
Built for hybrid environments, Spirion enables healthcare organizations to extend protection across clinical systems, remote workstations, and cloud-based care platforms, ensuring sensitive data remains secure wherever it travels.
Figure 2: DSPM provides visibility as to where sensitive data is, who has access to it, how it has been used, and the security posture of the data store or application.
Results
Healthcare organizations that implement Spirion gain measurable improvements in data security posture, regulatory alignment, and patient trust. Spirion’s Sensitive Data Platform enables significant improvements in how they manage, govern, and protect sensitive information. With the growing complexity of healthcare IT ecosystems spanning electronic health records, telehealth platforms, mobile devices, and third-party vendors, security and compliance teams require tools that go beyond simple detection.
Risk Reduction: Organizations reduce exposed PHI by up to 90% through targeted remediation of files stored on open drives, legacy systems, and unmanaged endpoints.
Audit Readiness: By generating on-demand compliance reports and maintaining accurate data inventories, healthcare teams streamline HIPAA audits and incident response workflows.
Operational Efficiency: Automated classification and remediation significantly reduce the need for manual review, saving hundreds of hours annually across IT, compliance, and data governance teams.
Improved Data Governance: Teams enforce consistent privacy policies enterprise-wide, ensuring sensitive data is only accessible to authorized staff and retained only as long as necessary.
Figure 3: Gain measurable improvements in data security posture, regulatory alignment, and patient trust.
Real-World Scenario: Regaining Control of Patient Records Across a Multi-Clinic Network
The following story is an amalgamation of how Spirion healthcare customers have utilized Sensitive Data Platform and the results. It is not drawn from a single organization:
A regional healthcare network with 12 clinics and two hospitals discovered during an internal compliance review that many departments had created local copies of patient intake forms, billing records, and treatment summaries. These documents, often containing full names, Social Security numbers, diagnoses, and insurance details, were stored in spreadsheets and PDFs across network drives, staff desktops, and email folders.
Concerned about HIPAA compliance and ransomware risks, the organization deployed Spirion across 1,200 endpoints and shared file systems. Within 48 hours, Spirion discovered over 16,000 unprotected PHI files that had been forgotten, duplicated, or miscategorized.
Spirion’s classification engine labeled the data by type and policy requirement. Dashboards revealed widespread overexposure, with nearly 60% of files accessible by personnel without a business need. Using automated playbooks, the organization quarantined high-risk files, applied encryption to active records, and removed stale data from non-compliant locations.
As a result, they achieved a 92% reduction in overexposed PHI within one month. HIPAA audit preparation time dropped by 50%, and patient trust improved through more precise data use disclosures. With Spirion, the network gained the ability to enforce enterprise-wide data policies without interrupting the care delivery process.
Looking Ahead
As healthcare organizations expand digital access and care delivery, they must also strengthen data governance, security, and compliance. Managing sensitive patient information cannot be left to manual processes or reactive tools.
Spirion provides healthcare providers and payers with the visibility and control necessary to meet today’s data privacy demands. Through accurate discovery, automated classification, and context-driven protection, organizations reduce risk, improve audit readiness, and build a privacy-first culture that protects patients and their data.
