8th CACR Information Security Workshop
2nd Annual Privacy and Security Workshop

Speaker
Sherry Shannon-Vanstone
CEO
Arcamatrix

Title
The Physician's Answer to Compliance to Privacy Legislation
PowerPoint presentation.

Abstract
In order to be competitive in this dynamic marketplace, healthcare enterprises will need to deploy information technology solutions that internally automate the paper-based medical record systems and externally create smart connections between the major participants in health care: the consumer, the physician, the hospital and the managed care organization.

The complexity of healthcare information requirements will continue to increase with provider consolidations and the challenging cost containment pressures. In the US, the recently implemented privacy regulations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) add an additional challenge for healthcare providers. This legislation, with a compliance date of April 2003, requires the protection and confidentially of all personal identifiable health information. Estimates on the cost of full compliance across all healthcare providers range from a low of $4.7 billion (provided by the US Department of Health and Human Services, which enforces the act) to as much as $40 billion. How about the small practices that make up more than 50% of all physicians in the US? How are they going to address the compliance issues? HIPAA certainly has created an incredible opportunity for an easy-to-use, cost-effective solution, especially for small practices.

In this talk, Ms. Shannon will present a service, Arcamedx, which was developed to provide secure digital document management that is also compliant with HIPAA and, hopefully, upcoming Canadian regulations. This talk will cover the challenges, approach, and technology used to develop such an easy-to-use, cost-effective, and secure solution.

Speaker Bio
Ms. Shannon has spent her career developing and deploying information security solutions. After obtaining a Master's of Science in Mathematics at the University of Tennessee, she worked with the National Security Agency (NSA) as a cryptologic mathematician and later as a liaison with industry on regulatory and policy issues, in particular, in the area of export and import of information security products.

Since leaving the NSA, Ms. Shannon has worked for two North American entrepreneurial information security companies (Cylink Corp., Sunnyvale, CA as Director of International Sales and Certicom Corp., Mississauga, Ontario, Canada as Vice President, Sales and Marketing) helping each to position for its Initial Public Offering. In particular, she contributed in many areas from developing global business and technology marketing strategies to setting up worldwide offices and distribution channels to direct sales. Later she joined MasterCard International as Vice President, Electronic Commerce, developing and deploying secure solutions for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business Internet commerce.

Currently Ms. Shannon is CEO with Arcamatrix, a secure digital document management service provider for healthcare professionals. Arcamatrix is a Canadian company based in Toronto with a wholly owned US subsidiary, Arcamatrix Inc. in Denver, Colorado.