Regional hospital network

The hospital network generated compliance audit reports quarterly for HIPAA and state health authority submissions. Each report required manual reconciliation of patient records, clinical data flows, and access logs across six systems — a three-day process requiring three analysts working full time. Audit gaps were identified post-submission, leading to two regulatory warnings in 18 months. The core problems were traceability and quality: there was no automated lineage from source systems to audit reports, data quality was validated manually via spot checks, and PHI (Protected Health Information) handling gaps were invisible until an auditor found them.

NEXUS™ was deployed with data contracts defining strict quality and compliance expectations for every clinical data source. PHI masking validation was added as a custom expectation — every pipeline run validated that no unmasked PHI appeared in Gold layer outputs. HIPAA field-level compliance rules were encoded into 38 custom expectations across the Silver and Gold pipelines. The OpenLineage integration captured complete data lineage for every pipeline execution: from HL7/FHIR source records through transformation layers to final audit outputs. ORBIT™ provided regulators with an interactive lineage graph — a direct line from any audit finding to its source data transformation. Data contracts enforced freshness SLAs ensuring no clinical record older than 24 hours appeared in real-time risk dashboards. Automated HIPAA compliance scoring ran on every pipeline run, with results stored to DynamoDB and surfaced in the compliance dashboard.

The team replaced manual audit spreadsheets with NEXUS™ compliance reports on day one of production. The 38 HIPAA expectations replaced 200+ manual checklist items. The first automated audit report was generated in 4 hours — compared to the previous 3-day manual process. Two subsequent regulatory inspections were completed with zero findings, using the automated lineage graph as primary documentation.