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Regional Medical Center Chooses Certes Networks for HIPAA/HITECH Compliance
February 2012 by Marc Jacob
Certes Networks, the leader in scalable network encryption, announced today that Jefferson Regional Medical Center, a regional hospital system in southeast Arkansas, has selected Certes Networks’ Advanced IPsec VPN solution to secure their regulated HIPPA/HITECH data across their network.
Jefferson Regional Medical Center is a not-for-profit, private 471-bed hospital in Pine Bluff Arkansas with four remote office locations. For cost savings, Jefferson Regional uses a line-of-sight Free-space Optical (FSO) link to connect one of the smaller remote locations to their Business Center.
“While we wanted to take advantage of the cost savings of free-space optical, we were not willing to compromise the security of our patients health information,” said Eric Whitmore, Network Engineer at Jefferson Regional. “We recognized not just the HIPAA/HITECH requirements to safeguard Protected Health Information (PHI), but importantly, we also acknowledge the trust that our patients place in us to keep their information secure.”
In order to secure the FSO connection, Jefferson Regional investigated several encryption solutions; including using a traditional tunnel-based IPsec VPN. “We looked at the options and realized that using a tunnel based VPN solution would add a whole layer of unnecessary complexity,” added Whitmore. “The TrustNet solution from Certes Networks was the only solution that provided standards based security without forcing us to modify our architecture or suffer performance degradation.”
Certes Networks provided Jefferson Regional with a transparent Layer 2 encryption solution that does not impact their existing network architecture, which includes a legacy Radio Frequency (RF) connection that serves as an emergency back-up connection. By offering easy set-up, flexible deployment options, and global control of the generation of policies and dynamic distribution of keys, TrustNet enables organizations to encrypt data, voice and video over any type of network without compromising application performance or network reliability.
“Jefferson Regional Medical Center joins a growing list of Certes Networks customers in the healthcare industry,” said Thomas Gill, CEO of Certes Networks. “They are further evidence that leading healthcare organizations can meet the security requirements of HIPAA and HITECH, as well as their own internal mandates for data privacy, without sacrificing network performance and reliability.”
