Case Study: Halifax Regional Health System achieves proactive privacy monitoring and rapid audit reporting with FairWarning

Halifax Regional Health System - Customer Case Study

Halifax Regional Health System, a long-serving rural hospital ranked among the top 5% of rural EHR adopters, had relied on McKesson STAR Audit for 17 years but faced a fragmented, manual and reactive auditing process. Staff had to run separate reports, call vendors to audit some applications, and only investigated access after complaints, leaving the organization unable to proactively detect privacy breaches or meet growing regulatory requirements.

By implementing FairWarning (with McKesson Services supporting audit-log integration), Halifax centralized audit data and deployed proactive, automated monitoring with minimal internal resource demand. The new system enabled daily alerts, randomized audits and fast, reliable reporting—reducing snooping incidents, streamlining disciplinary workflows, and cutting report turnaround from days or weeks to about 15 minutes—positioning the hospital to meet HIPAA and HITECH obligations.

Halifax Regional Health System

Bill Zirkle

Manager, Information Systems