What database to choose..

In my business as a solo lawyer I deal with confidential information and medical data covered by HIPPA. My day is filled with routine, mechanical, low skill, redundant work like ordering medical records, curating the medical records, submitting the medical records, soliciting and reviewing medical updates from clients etc. I currently use Microsoft Access. I have no employees, and really don't want them - what I would like to is be able to offload/offshore tasks to contractors like those on Upwork. But I do not want to expose HIPPA medical data or confidential data such as social security numbers to my virtual assistant(s). For this idea to work I obviously need an online database where my VAs can do the work, but I have been told that Microsoft Access is not so good in the security area for a cloud-based database. I also want my VAs to have limited access to sensitive data, but sensitive data would be "behind the scene": for example, in ordering medical records on a client we typically make reference to the client's SSN and/or Date of Birth. But I would only want my freelancer to work with a given client by name and/or perhaps an ID number for in office use only, but never see the confidential data.

Is there a database product I should be looking at?

 

See, database is simply a storage system. It doesn't matters which one you use.

If you are giving direct access to your database to a virtual assistant, then you need to "encode/encrypt" the sensitive parts of the data you have stored.

For example, if client email is stored as ""
then instead of storing it like that, encrypt it with a hashkey, and then store the encrypted email in the database.

After encryption, it might look something like this:
oefierhiohuiqhiocixhcwiuhwiucnhnmwiuhqiohfio ]x

Not readable, and without the key, the virtual assistant cannot decrypt it either. So your sensitive info is safe.

If this is not an option, then another way is to get a separate front end system coded, which connects to your unencrypted database, pulls out only the specified data parts, and displays only those parts to your virtual assistant.
The database itself is hidden from your virtual assistant. He only uses a custom coded access panel to access "certain" parts of the database, nothing else.

So you could have "emails, social numbers, client name, your comments," etc stored in the database.
But front end only pulls out "client name, your comments" parts, and displays those to your virtual assistant, nothing else.

You will connect to the same database, either from a different panel, or using special priviledges on the same panel, and can view/modify any part of the database.