Compliance is a top priority for any business that deals with protected health information (PHI). According to the HIPAA Journal, 2024 set a new record for healthcare data breaches, with breaches in 2025 only falling by 13.5%. That is a reminder that risk doesn’t live in one department. It shows up anywhere PHI moves across people, tools, and vendors.
Are you sure your language services provider complies with state and federal regulations regarding PHI?
The twin mandates of compliance and security in the translation process (and other forms of document processing, like for other file format types) are essential to protecting your members’ and patients’ sensitive information, maintaining their trust, and safeguarding your organization. Let’s explore the essential elements of PHI, the challenges of safeguarding it during document processing, and the best practices for secure handling.
PHI and navigating regulatory compliance
Protected Health Information (PHI) includes any data related to a patient’s health status, diagnosis, or treatment plan, or payment for healthcare that can be linked to an individual. This includes medical records, billing information, and even conversations with healthcare providers about treatment. Mishandling this information can harm patients and lead to fines and other sanctions against your organization.
Compliance with regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is mandatory to protect PHI. HIPAA outlines national standards for safeguarding this information. These include controlling access to PHI, training staff on data protection, and using encryption for data storage and transmission. State laws, like California’s CCPA and CPRA, add additional layers of protection for residents’ personal data, including health information, requiring stricter consent protocols, broader rights for individuals to access and delete their data, and more stringent reporting obligations for data breaches.
Organizations must also verify that their third-party vendors comply with these regulations to maintain overall compliance and protect patient information. And this is a major entry point for risk. When PHI is involved, this is typically formalized through a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) that defines permitted uses, required safeguards, and downstream subcontractor obligations.
The challenges of PHI compliance when adapting content for accessibility or translation
We routinely process translation or braille and large-print format requests containing abundant and varied PHI for our clients in the healthcare space. This often includes appeals and grievances, ID cards issued outside the United States, medical records from overseas hospitals, and financial records. PHI in these types of documents can include images, birthdates, barcodes and machine-readable zones (that can be scanned to reveal data), demographic and biometrics (sex, height, hair color, weight, eye color, and fingerprints), Because more healthcare organizations now seek support to meet language access requirements, there needs to be reassurance that language services providers remove this type of information when sharing files with production staff during the project lifecycle.
The question naturally comes to us: how do we protect all of this data during our workflows? To protect the privacy of the individual and to comply with regulations, all personally identifiable information must be scrubbed by means of secure and permanent digital document redaction. Then the relevant details must be added back securely at the end of the process, when the final document is ready to be delivered to our client.
Identifying and redacting PHI in all of its forms used to be a labor-intensive manual process, driving up turnaround time and adding both risk and costs to the project.
Enter our automated PHI redaction service, which protects sensitive data, allowing you to comfortably outsource this work. Here’s how we do it.
Our innovative solution for PHI protection
Our PHI redaction workflow gives you the confidence to outsource without exposing you to compliance issues and potential fines.
Member- or patient-specific, critical communications are often created from templates, making them ideal candidates to leverage our proprietary tech and automated workflows. Our AI-based technology scrubs sensitive PHI from these documents before they enter our workflow. Before any document is sent off for processing, there is an automatic check to confirm that all sensitive information has been properly removed.
Once the adaptation (translation or conversion to braille or large print) is completed, the final documents are prepped to be delivered to our clients. At this point, the previously removed PHI data is securely reintroduced through our proprietary automated workflows. This process reduces turnaround times and eliminates manual intervention, therefore offering substantial cost savings to our clients while eliminating risk.
By redacting PHI before processing and reintroducing it afterward, we safeguard sensitive information while complying with privacy regulations and providing efficient and cost-effective solutions to our clients.
Keep your customers’ PHI safe with BIG Language Solutions
Protecting PHI during document processing is essential for compliance and maintaining trust. At BIG Language Solutions, our AI-powered PHI redaction solution guarantees your documents are handled with the highest security standards. By removing sensitive data at the outset and reintroducing it afterwards, we offer the cost benefits of outsourcing without compromising privacy and exposing you to risk.
This is all part of our LanguageExpress™ service offering: a highly scalable system providing high-volume, accurate, rapid translations and document adaptations. It includes same-day translations, direct-to-member fulfillment from request to printing to mailing, and secure, compliant workflows.
LanguageExpress™ is a good fit for you if:
- You are a healthcare organization with large volumes of documents to quickly translate or convert to another file format
- Your documents largely use templates or structured text (which enable the use of our automations), including XML, JSON, or CSV file formats
- You are concerned about security and compliance with regulations
- You need an end-to-end solution for your document adaptation requirements
Are you ready to improve your document translation, large print, and braille processes with secure and cost-effective solutions? Contact us today and see how we can safeguard your sensitive data, helping you stay compliant with HIPAA while delivering exceptional service.
