Four years ago, Brett Curran faced a daunting deadline. The senior corporate compliance director at HealthMarkets, a $2 billion North Richland Hills, Tex., insurer, knew the company had to meet new federal HIPAA regulations, and there wasn't much time to do it. The only answer was to automate the process. But with 10 business

units operating largely independently of one another, each with its own IT infrastructure, he realized he needed a system that could not only monitor against a consistent set of policies, but also provide each division with flexibility to introduce its own procedures–and the best way to tie everyone together would be through the Web. "It was the only way to remove the boundaries created by traditional client-server applications," he says.

After a brief search, Curran decided on Axentis Enterprise Suite from Axentis, based in Warrensville Heights, Ohio. Using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) system, in which the software would be installed on Axentis servers, the program seemed to offer the quickest and most effective solution. Curran now swears by the HIPAA monitoring system. The Web-based approach made training staff from different divisions easier since everyone could tap into the system simultaneously. "We had a smooth deployment and rollout," he says.