The numbers prove the pain. While 70% of U.S. hospitals outsource claims processing offshore, they pay 300% more for data preparation. Why? Compliance rules block direct access to sensitive patient data.

Global Capability Centers (GCCs) promise major cost reductions for data-heavy healthcare functions. But PHI and PII can't leave US borders. Teams are forced to choose: expensive compliance workarounds or abandon offshore operations entirely.

The result is clear: Critical cost-saving initiatives get delayed or abandoned because the risk feels too high.

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The Real Barrier: Legacy Systems + Sensitive Data

For years, healthcare organizations have been stuck balancing two immovable forces: highly sensitive data housed in legacy systems and a mandate to reduce operational overhead. Compliance teams are rightly cautious about moving PII or PHI beyond secure environments, and many enterprises rely on outdated tools that simply aren’t up to the task of sufficiently securing and protecting sensitive data for Global Capability Centers.

A VP of Cloud Security at a Fortune 500 healthcare provider told us:

“Legacy solutions have failed to meet the requirements for offshoring healthcare data. Despite years of effort around de-identification and using synthetic data, we consistently hit walls when trying to get through security team’s approval.”

This has real consequences.

Current Approaches Are Costly and Inefficient

Organizations that do manage to offshore sensitive data processing face a painful tradeoff: compliance or efficiency. Typical data protection methods force companies to choose between expensive preprocessing workflows that destroy data utility or maintaining costly onshore operations that limit scale.

The numbers tell the story - companies are spending 300% more on data preparation and compliance oversight just to move basic operations offshore. Yes, they meet compliance standards – but at a cost that could be unnecessary.

The result is that many teams forgo offshoring, automation, and operational efficiency because securing data at scale is too expensive with legacy approaches and the risk of not doing it right is too punitive.

A Better Way: A Data Privacy Vault For Global Capability Centers

Skyflow Healthcare Data Privacy Vault is purpose-built to secure protected health information (PHI) and other sensitive data. With advanced format-preserving tokenization and polymorphic encryption, Skyflow transforms sensitive data with polymorphically encrypted tokens that maintain structure, integrity, and utility of sensitive healthcare data, making the data safe for offshore use.

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Unlike older encryption methods, which can limit data usability, Skyflow allows businesses to securely manage and use sensitive data across modern workflows, all without the need for complex re-architecture of existing systems nor operating on data in the open. Skyflow unlocks global efficiencies without compliance risk. Built on zero-trust architecture, Skyflow integrates with existing data stacks including Snowflake, Databricks, and AWS without requiring infrastructure changes.

Skyflow's BYOT (Bring Your Own Tokens) capability enables zero-downtime migration from existing tokenization systems, while searchable tokens maintain referential integrity across distributed teams.

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>> Watch: When Privacy and Innovation are both P0 with GoodRx CTO Nitin Shingate

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Structured and Unstructured Data – Fully Protected

What’s more, tokenization and polymorphic encryption can be applied to both structured and unstructured data. 

Most sensitive data isn't just rows in a database. Skyflow secures both structured and unstructured data, including audio, images, PDFs, and text files, enabling safe usage across:

• Raw clinical notes and financial statements
• Doctor-patient conversation transcripts and customer service calls  
• Scanned health insurance cards and identity documents
• Medical imaging metadata and transaction records

And more.

Instead of relying on preprocessing pipelines that completely redact information or block entire files from being used, Skyflow creates privacy-safe versions of the content that can be securely used for offshore processes. That means less manual overhead, faster time-to-value, and drastically reduced compliance risk.

Unlike traditional approaches, Skyflow's format-preserving tokens enable complex operations like joins, aggregations, and ML model training without ever exposing sensitive data.

Beyond tokenization, Skyflow's governance engine provides fine-grained access control over data visibility based on roles and policies. Offshore teams can receive partially masked data, fully redacted fields, or complete tokens depending on their specific function - a claims processor in a GCC in India might see masked patient names but full claim amounts, while an analytics team in a Philippines GCC receives fully tokenized identifiers with preserved relationships. As business needs evolve, these access policies can be updated dynamically without disrupting operations, ensuring that role changes, new compliance requirements, or shifting business priorities don't require system overhauls or data migrations.

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According to a healthcare analytics firm we recently spoke with, polymorphic encryption and tokenization could finally enable secure offshore development, something their teams have been striving for some time:

“I want to tokenize the data and never have to worry about it. Once it's tokenized, it becomes safe for offshore use. No complicated refactoring. No additional risk. We’ve been holding ourselves back, but tokenization could immediately allow secure offshore development and unlock new value across millions of patient records.”

Projects are already underway across complex healthcare organizations – proof that transformation is not only possible but practical.

Cost Savings, AI Acceleration, and Better Healthcare Outcomes

The benefits of using a data privacy vault to protect sensitive patient data go far beyond cost savings. Healthcare organizations are able to not only significantly reduce operational expenses, but also to adopt and deploy AI and analytics solutions more rapidly.

Protecting sensitive data opens up capacity. A rapidly growing healthcare technology provider discovered this when they hit the same wall every healthcare organization faces: traditional de-identification either destroys data utility or creates compliance gaps.

Their offshore teams needed to process everything from clinical notes (unstructured data) to lab results (structured data) without choosing between data utility and security. Basic data masking destroys clinical utility, while insufficient protection creates compliance gaps.

Skyflow's approach enables automated detection across 60+ healthcare identifiers while preserving the clinical context their operations require. This allows both structured and unstructured data to become accessible across offshore teams, fueling deeper insights, automation, and better healthcare outcomes while achieving unprecedented operational efficiency.

Similar implementations are underway in financial services for fraud detection and insurance for claims automation.

Security is integrated from the ground up, and governance is no longer a blocker to efficiency. Streamlined compliance frameworks allow teams to experiment, collaborate with vendors, and launch new ideas efficiently and securely. The return on investment is clear, and for many, this is only the beginning.

Unlock Offshore Potential 

The technology to safely unlock offshore potential is already here. For healthcare organizations that have been throttled due to concerns about risk or complexity, Skyflow can help them safely use their data, protecting it to make offshore access secure, compliant, and fast.

Leading healthcare organizations like GoodRx, Nomi Health, and more entrust Skyflow with sensitive PII and healthcare data. 

Ready to unlock your Global Capability Center's potential? 

Schedule a 30-minute technical assessment to identify your highest-impact offshore use cases.