Case Study: Leading Edge Healthcare Institution achieves secure cloud PHI sharing and HIPAA compliance with Digital Guardian

How a Renowned Healthcare Institution Protects Patient Data in the Cloud

Leading Edge Healthcare Institution sought to adopt cloud storage to speed collaboration across campuses and with external partners while meeting strict HIPAA/HITECH rules for Protected Health Information (PHI). The organization needed more than encryption — it required visibility and precise control to prevent PHI leakage without disrupting clinicians or researchers. To meet that challenge they turned to Digital Guardian, implementing Digital Guardian for Cloud Data Protection together with Box.

Digital Guardian deployed its Cloud Data Protection solution (using Database Record Matching™ and Event Based Scanning integrated with the Box APIs) to inspect file events, remediate policy violations in near real-time (configured to scan on ~60‑second intervals), and automatically move, remove, or alert on PHI exposures. In production since August 2014, Digital Guardian’s approach delivered high accuracy and minimal user impact: audits show over 99% of file-move notifications generated no user objection, enabling secure, HIPAA‑compliant cloud collaboration across the institution.