Case Study: Memorial Hermann achieves high-availability, enterprise-wide privacy monitoring and proactive breach detection with FairWarning

Cerner High-Availability Privacy Auditing with FairWarning

Memorial Hermann Healthcare System, Texas’s largest not-for-profit health system with 12 hospitals, ~19,500 employees and a primary Cerner Millennium EHR, needed comprehensive privacy monitoring across more than 100 patient-related systems. Their existing Cerner P2 Sentinel deployment could not deliver the advanced reporting, analytics or cross-application coverage required for HIPAA, ARRA HITECH and Meaningful Use compliance, leaving the Privacy and Information Security teams unable to effectively detect or report potential breaches.

After evaluating alternatives, Memorial Hermann implemented FairWarning for application-layer privacy monitoring (while using ArcSight for infrastructure logs), deploying a high‑availability FairWarning appliance pair and integrating with Cerner, GE PACS and CGI Sovera. The solution processes over 200,000 events per hour (~6GB/day), provides proactive alerts, advanced analytics and HR/location filtering, keeps three years of audit logs online (six years archived), and delivered the reporting and breach-detection capabilities that satisfied Privacy Officers.

Memorial Hermann

Randy Yates

Director of Information Security