SEATTLE – Seattle Children’s Hospital has turned to hard disk encryption to make workstation and patient health data more secure from outside intrusions.

“Healthcare providers can’t afford to put their patients’ information at risk,” said Wes Wright, vice president and CTO of Seattle Children’s Hospital. “The sensitive nature of the information we deal with demands the highest levels of security and confidentiality.” 

San Francisco-based GuardianEdge's Hard Disk Encryption software will be used to encrypt information passing through workstations throughout the hospital as well as personal health information being stored at the hospital on laptops and USB drives.

“We want our doctors, nurses and researchers to be able to focus on patient care and not worry about information security,” said Wright. “I had worked with GuardianEdge solutions in the past and wanted to introduce them here because of their centralized manageability and ability to integrate easily within existing infrastructures. As a result of this deployment, our IT staff is secure in the knowledge that patient information on laptops and USB drives is safe and encrypted.”

The hospital is a designated medical referral facility for healthcare organizations in the Alaska, Montana and Idaho area as well as a research site for the Universtiy of Washington School of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics.