HIPAA Compliance

Splunk: Big data for Healthcare

Healthcare data is generated by numerous systems and in a wide variety of formats--syslog, custom application logs, XML, HL7 and myriad other formats. Add to this business vertical an IT vendor technology landscape that is influenced by mergers, acquisitions and disparate and conflicting development processes. It's no surprise that most healthcare applications do not conform to a single data format. With so many off-the-shelf and customer applications providing information in unique formats to contend with, managing this data and deriving value from it represents an ongoing struggle for healthcare industry IT professionals.

Most healthcare providers are concerned about three things:

• Profitability and Efficiency - making sure service is optimized for every dollar spent;
• Better Patient Outcomes - improving the quality of service delivered to the patient and;
• HIPAA Compliance - making sure we protect patient (and employee data) while giving access to the right persons at the right times to do their jobs.

Most healthcare payers (insurance companies) are concerned about three things:

• Profitability and Efficiency - making sure service is optimized for every dollar spent;
• Fraud - understand the difference between billing errors and organized schemes to defraud and;
• HIPAA Compliance - making sure that people see only the data they need to do their jobs.

It's no accident that these concerns look similar. The answer to these concerns really is - 'it's in the data.' Seeking patterns in large amount of data--terabytes and petabytes--collected from a wide variety of systems correlated and seen in the context of time and place can provide answers to the most common and pressing questions asked by these two sides of the healthcare coin.

Splunk: An agile big data solution

Some of the many business questions Splunk is able to answer are:

• Are the third shift nurses more efficient than first shift when administering prescribed treatments?
• How much drug diversion is taking place in the hospital?
• Are off-shift hospital personnel viewing patient data records and what's the potential fine amount to the hospital?
• Are there multiple claims from the same doctor for reimbursement for services from many difference cities for more patients than humanly possible?
• What are the anomalies in the numbers of specific kinds of treatments provided against a rolling 30 day average from a particular location?

Splunk can be used to measure the amount of time spent with a patient at each phase of service to support a Time-Driven-Activity-Based-Costing model in lieu of a payment for services model. Splunk was founded specifically to focus on the challenges and opportunity of effectively managing massive amounts of machine data. As well as context from other databases. Over 5,200 customers in 90+ countries use Splunk to harness the power of their machine data for application management, IT operations, cybersecurity, compliance, web intelligence, and business analytics. With Splunk they achieve new levels of visibility and insights that benefit IT and the business.

Splunk can collect and index any data without regard to format and perform Google-like searches across petabytes of data. Splunk's verbose flexible analytics command language allows you to ask questions of your data that when translated into automated search queries can answer specific business questions.

Healthcare Customers



Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) is a system of 42 hospitals and medical centers in California, Arizona and Nevada. Founded in 1986, CHW is the eighth largest hospital system in the nation and the largest not-for-profit hospital provider in California. Catholic Healthcare West has established Splunk as a standard for centralized data management, providing distributed search to provide a singular view across all of CHW's IT teams and hospitals. CHW uses Splunk for security monitoring and HIPAA compliance. Solution Areas: Application Management, Compliance



Health Net, Inc. is among the nation's largest publicly traded managed health care companies. Health Net uses Splunk to centrally collect and monitor logs from Cisco PIX firewalls and Cisco routers. Solution Areas: Compliance, Log Management, Network Management



Revolution Health Group, chaired by AOL co-founder Steve Case, is creating a health company where patients are put at the center of the health system with more choices, more convenience and more control over their health care. Revolution is using Splunk to consolidate logs from J2EE applications to accelerate troubleshooting and improve availability. Solution Areas: Application Management



The Children's Hospital of Boston uses Splunk as the central logging server for all their audit logs. Using Splunk helps the hospital to cost-effectively comply with HIPAA and significantly cuts down investigation times. Solution Areas: Compliance, Log Management, Security