Cascadia Health Streamlines HIPAA Audits with NGNTA
How a multi-site hospital network gained full visibility into unmanaged IoT and medical devices — cutting compliance audit prep from three weeks to three days.
Skip ahead: Challenge | Solution | Results
About Cascadia Health
Cascadia Health operates a network of hospitals and outpatient clinics across the Pacific Northwest, running thousands of connected medical devices — infusion pumps, imaging systems, patient monitors — alongside its administrative and clinical IT systems.
Cascadia's IT security team is accountable for HIPAA compliance across every site, but growing device sprawl, much of it introduced by clinical departments outside IT's direct purchasing process, made it increasingly difficult to know exactly what was connected to the network at any given time.
CHALLENGE: An Unknown Number of Devices, an Unforgiving Compliance Deadline
Cascadia's asset inventory was built from purchase records and manual walkthroughs — a process that couldn't keep pace with clinical departments plugging in new IoT and medical devices between audit cycles. Nobody could say with confidence exactly how many devices were on the network, let alone what protocols they spoke.
Some legacy imaging systems still communicated over unencrypted, decades-old protocols — invisible to Cascadia's existing tools, and a direct HIPAA risk if ever discovered by an auditor first. Producing the audit trail evidence auditors required for even a single incident could take days of manual log correlation across systems.
"Every audit cycle started with the same uncomfortable question: what's actually on our network right now? We had a spreadsheet, but spreadsheets don't catch the imaging machine biomed plugged in last week without telling anyone."
With patient data and life-safety devices on the same clinical VLANs, Cascadia needed a way to see everything without touching, agent-installing on, or risking disruption to sensitive medical equipment.
SOLUTION: Passive Visibility Purpose-Built for Clinical Networks
Cascadia deployed NGNTA passively across its clinical VLANs via existing mirror ports — with no agents installed on medical devices and no risk to systems that can never tolerate downtime or a dropped packet.
NGNTA's traffic analysis engine automatically inventoried every device communicating on the network by its actual behavior, while the Log Auditing module began building a searchable, timestamped audit trail from day one — exactly the evidence format HIPAA auditors expect. The platform also flagged devices using weak or unencrypted protocols for the biomedical engineering team to prioritize.
"We didn't have to touch a single device to get a complete, accurate picture of what was actually talking on our network. That alone changed how confident we felt walking into our next audit."
"Because it's completely passive, biomed and clinical engineering never had to sign off on touching a single machine," Chen added. "That removed the biggest political and operational hurdle we usually run into with security projects in a hospital."
RESULTS: Full Visibility, Faster Audits, Zero Incidents
Within its first month live, NGNTA gave Cascadia a complete, verified inventory of more than 3,400 networked devices across its hospitals and clinics — the first time the security team had a real-time, evidence-based count rather than an estimate.
The platform identified 22 legacy devices communicating over unencrypted or otherwise weak protocols, which biomedical engineering was then able to prioritize for remediation or network segmentation — closing gaps that had been invisible for years.
With NGNTA's searchable audit trail in place, Cascadia cut its HIPAA compliance audit preparation time from roughly three weeks down to three days, and has recorded zero patient-data-related security incidents since deployment.
"Our last audit took three days instead of three weeks, and every question the auditor asked, we could answer with data instead of a guess. That's not just a compliance win — it's peace of mind for every department in this hospital."
Cascadia is now extending its NGNTA deployment to two additional facilities acquired this year, using the same passive, zero-touch approach to bring new sites into compliance from day one.
About NGNTA
NGNTA is the trusted standard in real-time network traffic analysis and threat response, used by finance, telecom, and healthcare security teams to protect infrastructure without slowing it down. Our passive platform combines live flow analysis, AI-driven threat detection, automated mitigation, and compliance-ready audit trails in a single console.
Deployable via a single tap or mirror port with no inline hardware and no downtime, NGNTA scales from a single branch office to global critical infrastructure. Ready to see what it can do for your network?
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