Chelsea Anestal

Healthcare Cybersecurity Compliance: HIPAA, HITECH, & Financial Risk

Date: May 2025

This graduate-level research project explores the intersection of healthcare cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and financial risk. The paper examines HIPAA and HITECH frameworks, real-world cybersecurity incidents like the Change Healthcare breach, and vendor accountability concerns. It also proposes forward-looking policy and technical recommendations.

• Incorporated academic, regulatory, and industry sources (CDC, HHS, IBM, etc.)
• Highlighted issues with de-identified data, ethical AI use, and third-party risk
• Earned an A+ and described by faculty as “publication-ready”

AI-Powered FinTech App

Background: Managing finances—both personal and professional—can be complex. This project focuses on building a secure, AI-powered fintech application that offers insights, suggestions, and tools to improve financial decision-making.

Objective: Design and develop a scalable, secure mobile application for financial data management with AI-enhanced features.

Tools & Technologies:

• Frontend: React Native (cross-platform mobile)
• Backend: Node.js / Django / FastAPI
• Database: PostgreSQL (hosted on Render)
• Auth & KYC: Stripe Identity
• APIs: Open Banking APIs
• Hosting: Railway
• Security: SSL, encrypted DB fields, 2FA (Firebase)

Process & Contribution:

• Engineered a secure architecture for handling sensitive financial data
• Integrated real-time banking APIs for live financial insights
• Implemented KYC and 2FA for enhanced user security
• Handled full-stack development from UI/UX to deployment

Outcome: Delivered a robust, scalable fintech solution that enables users to manage and analyze financial data securely.

Reflection: This project sharpened my full-stack development skills, particularly in secure data handling and integrating AI-driven features for real-world financial use cases.

🏥 EHR Adoption DataSet Analysis – Case Study

Background: EHRs are foundational to modern healthcare, but adoption varies across institutions. This project explored adoption trends in non-federal acute care hospitals across the U.S.

Objective: Clean, model, and visualize a large-scale dataset to identify patterns in EHR adoption and usage, supporting data-driven healthcare strategy.

Tools & Technologies: PySpark, Pandas, NumPy, RandomForestRegressor, Big Data processing, Jupyter/Databricks, Data.gov dataset.

Process & Contribution:

• Imported and validated raw healthcare data from Data.gov
• Renamed schema fields for clarity and dropped non-essential columns
• Handled missing values using a multimodel approach: RandomForestRegressor for high-value features and group-based or global mean imputation for the rest
• Engineered a cleaned dataset ready for advanced visualization and analysis

Outcome: A structured and enriched dataset showcasing hospital EHR trends, enabling strategic insights for research and policy work.

Reflection: This project strengthened my ability to work with large healthcare datasets and build pipelines that integrate machine learning with meaningful real-world outcomes.

🚀 View EHR Dashboard

🩺 The Digital Transformation of Healthcare

Project Type: Individual Academic Research

Tools and Technologies:Tableau, Excel, FRED, Data.gov, HealthIT.gov, Census, World Bank

Summary: This solo project explores how digital technology and health IT adoption shape workforce dynamics, facility readiness, and patient access. I analyzed five public datasets and built dashboards to identify regional and structural disparities in EHR use and digital engagement.

Key Highlights:

• Created interactive dashboards visualizing: EHR adoption by state and facility type, HIT employment and healthcare expenditure trends, and Relationship between household tech access and digital care uptake.
• Delivered insights on how digital infrastructure affects health equity
• Proposed research directions on patient outcomes and health IT gaps

🎥 Watch the Presentation 📈 View Dashboards

🌍 AI Governance and Financial Risk Mitigation for a Global ERP Initiative

Role: Project Lead

Type: Group Strategy & Governance Plan

Course: ISM 6155 – Enterprise Information Systems Management

Challenge

Emerald Hotels & Resorts planned to deploy an AI-enhanced Oracle ERP system globally. As project lead, I oversaw the development of an AI governance framework and comprehensive risk mitigation plan to ensure responsible use of AI across departments and regions.

Key Finance-Focused Contributions

• Financial Risk Identification: Mapped operational risks to financial exposure, using impact/likelihood models to prioritize risk controls
• Compliance Alignment: Integrated global data privacy laws into governance practices to mitigate multi-million dollar penalty risks.
• Governance Structuring: Assigned financial accountability roles across Compliance, Data Privacy, and IT units.
• Continuity Planning: Developed a risk-resilient implementation timeline to prevent costly downtime during ERP system cutovers.
• Training Programs: Designed employee modules to reduce financial risks tied to AI errors, data leaks, and compliance breaches.

Outcome

Delivered a financially resilient AI governance and risk management framework ready to scale internationally. Structured the plan to safeguard revenue continuity, enhance investor confidence, and reduce total cost of compliance over time.

Core Skills Demonstrated

Financial Risk Management | AI Governance | Regulatory Compliance (GDPR, CCPA) | Operational Risk Assessment | Cost Mitigation Planning | Enterprise Risk Strategy

🧪 Independent Study: AI Platform Development

Developed and maintained server-based AI platforms for research support. Handled data analysis, visualization, and presentations to guide data-driven decision making.

Tech: Python, Docker, Flask, Django, FastAPI, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, NoSQL, AWS, GCP, Azure

📊 AI-ML-Exploratory Work

Explorations in decision trees, ensemble methods, and neural networks.

🤖 Research Chattr Platform

Built a customizable AI chatbot platform to support research teams in interactive studies.

💬 ResearchChat Platform

A live webpage enabling human-AI interaction for behavioral research and conversational analysis.

⚙️ SWARM Algorithm Optimization

Designed a flexible optimization framework with custom constraints and topologies for domain-specific solutions like EHR imputation.