The Problem
Research Collaboration Expands PHI Exposure
Every research partnership, registry submission, grant-funded project, and data-sharing agreement creates another copy of sensitive patient data outside your institution's control. Traditional security models cannot enforce access policies once data has been shared.
IRB Approval Is Not Technical Protection
IRB approval establishes governance. It does not prevent patient data from being copied, stored, forwarded, or accessed beyond its intended use after it reaches a partner institution.
De-Identification Has Limits
De-identified datasets can become re-identifiable when combined with clinical, demographic, genomic, or institutional datasets from collaborating organizations.
Research Happens Outside Institutional Boundaries
Researchers routinely work across institutions, devices, networks, and cloud environments. Traditional perimeter security was never designed for modern research collaboration.
HIPAA Safe Harbor
A Breach of Properly Encrypted PHI May Not Be a Reportable Breach
If protected health information is lost, stolen, or accessed by an unauthorized party, properly encrypted data remains unreadable and unusable. HHS guidance is explicit: encrypted PHI does not trigger breach notification requirements. That means a security incident does not automatically become a reportable breach. The result can be reduced breach liability, lower cyber insurance costs, and a dramatically different outcome for your organization.
“Protected health information (PHI) is rendered unusable, unreadable, or indecipherable to unauthorized individuals if one or more of the following applies: electronic PHI has been encrypted as specified in the HIPAA Security Rule… such encryption renders the breach notification provisions of the HITECH Act inapplicable.”
No Public Disclosure
No 60-day notification clock, no HHS portal listing, no press release.
Reduced OCR Exposure
Demonstrated safeguards reduce regulatory and enforcement exposure.
Lower Insurance Premiums
Record-level encryption may qualify for carrier premium credits.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Seald Healthcare actually do?
Seald Healthcare encrypts patient data at the record level before it reaches third-party systems and attaches access policies that remain with the data wherever it goes. You decide who can access each record, under what conditions, and for how long, and you can revoke that access at any time, even after the data has been shared. The result is that PHI remains readable only to the people and systems you authorize, across every vendor, cloud, and workflow.
What happens to our data after we share it with a vendor?
You keep control of it. Every record remains encrypted and policy-bound after it leaves your environment, decryptable only at the authorized point of access. If a vendor relationship ends, you can revoke access to records that have already been shared. Every access, denial, and policy change is recorded in a tamper-evident audit log.
If one of our vendors is breached, are our patients still exposed?
Not the way they are today. When a vendor stores patient data in plaintext, a breach of that vendor exposes every record. With Seald Healthcare, the vendor holds only ciphertext and does not hold the keys, so a breach of their environment reaches data that remains unreadable. Under the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule (45 CFR §164.402), properly encrypted PHI with keys held separately is not considered unsecured PHI. A breach that reaches only encrypted data may not be a reportable breach at all. That can mean no notification campaign, reduced regulatory exposure, and a dramatically different outcome for your organization.
Does Seald Healthcare have access to our data?
No. This is enforced by architecture, not policy. Seald Healthcare does not receive your patient data in readable form. The application keys that decrypt records remain on your side, which means we cannot access your data even if we wanted to.