The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) sets security standards for safeguarding important patient health information that is being stored and maintained in analog and digital forms. As new technologies continue to facilitate the healthcare industry’s transition to paperless processes, health care providers, insurance companies, and other institutions are also growing increasingly dependent on electronic information systems to manage their HIPAA compliance programs. As a result, the safety and security of sensitive health data has become a major concern across the board. Security Risks and Challenges Today, health care professionals are using technology extensively in almost every aspect of the practice.
Electronic health record (EHR) system transformed the health care system from a paper based industry to one that uses clinical information to provide higher quality of care to the patients by providers. Electronic medical records have many benefits in clinical, organizational and societal outcomes. Clinical outcomes includes improvements in the quality of care and reduction of medical errors. Organizational outcomes include, financial and operational performance as well as higher satisfaction among patients and clinicians. Societal outcomes include, conduct research and attain improved population health.
Healthcare providers and organizations are obligated and bound to protect patient confidentiality by laws and regulations. Patient information may only be disclosed to those directly involved in the patient’s care or those the patient identifies as able to receive the information. The HIPAA Act of 1996 is the federal law mandating healthcare organizations and clinicians to safeguard patient’s medical information. This law corresponds with the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act to include security standards for protecting electronic health information. The healthcare organization is legally responsible for establishing procedures to prevent data
With the use of EHR comes the opportunity for patients to receive improved coordinated care from medical professions and easier access to their health data. The author identifies views about the problems of EHR and the legislation. Health care professionals understand and accept the obligations under the Privacy and Security, patient’s information can still be at breached if those involved in patient health do not make sure that their information is secured. There is an increased risk of privacy violations with EHR if used improperly. Even though there are legislations in place to protect patient’s information, data still can be easily accessed either intentionally or accidental by using improper security measures.
Confidentiality and data breaches are a few of the main concerns, as many providers become neglectful when sharing patient electronic health information. Current use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) has proven to be helpful for hospitals and independent medical practice to provide efficient care for patients. Balestra reports that using computers to maintain patient health records and care reduces errors, and advances in health information technology are saving lives and reducing cost (Balestra, 2017). As technology advances EHR are going to continue to be the main method of record keeping among medical providers. Therefore, staff and medical providers need to be trained on how to properly share patients EHR safely and in a secure form in order to maintain patient confidentiality.
Therefore, security and protection is dictated by where the healthcare data is initiated within the healthcare delivery system. Futuristically, the concept of security and privacy is determined by where patient’s data begins which creates a huge question of how to protect data exchange since today’s healthcare is so patient centric. Presently, the healthcare community is promoting increased patient involvement in their care via technology such as patient portals. Furthermore, implementing HIPAA and HITECH can seem restrictive and cumbersome to the patient thereby creating opposing forces between two very important goals of the future healthcare system: increased patient involvement as well as increased healthcare information
If patients lack trust in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), Having an unsure feeling that the confidentiality and accuracy of their electronic health information is at risk, they may not want to share their health information. Restraining their health information could have life-threatening consequences. Therefor, This is a reason why it’s so important to assure the privacy and security of health information. When patients own your trust and health information technology (health IT) enough to share their health information, doctors will have a more complete picture of patients’ overall health and together, the doctor and their patient can make more-informed
This system gives patients private and secure electronic health information that can exchange security. This law is put in place to national set security standards meant to protect electronic protected health information. This rule contains different safeguard measures, which includes administrative, physical and technical safeguards that must be put in place to safeguard patient electronic transmission. The act provided a cost savings way to obtain electronic medical records; The HITECH law offers the protection needed to give a patient the privacy and security associated with their health information.
The healthcare industry must have more rigor in how it handles patient information. The policy team must define data classification elements as well. The data an organization produces is not always prone to security risks; however, with the proper classification elements defined, an organization can determine the appropriate level of rigor that should be applied. A key component of an information security policy is an incident response to the policy.
With constant unveilings of data breaches in various industries, it has become a growing concern for providers, consumers and payers. Patient privacy is the main priority of the industry and it is a must that the providers need to be aware of the best practices possible for data security in order to avoid HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) violations that can cause a negative effect on an
Ethical and Security Issues of HIT The excitement of health information technology (HIT) has given freedom to the public to have access to health care records and has created a problem with ethical and security issues. For the most part, access to personal health information (PHI) is available to anyone who requests it. The problem health care organizations face is the ability for individuals to duplicate and transmit their information to unauthorized persons. More and more people are signing to have access to personal health records (PHR) without any standards to protect sensitive data (Brown 2009). The health care facility has the responsibility to protect the information that individuals are supposed to have and ensure it meets the entire
According to healthit.gov the Benefits of Electronic Health Records are… • Improved Patient Care • Improved Care Coordination • Improved Diagnostics & Patient Outcomes • Practice Efficiencies & Cost Savings AND • Increase Patient Participation I. The way Patient Care is Improved, is by providing things like…Creating clinical alerts and reminders, Giving support for diagnostic and therapeutic decisions, Improving aggregation, analysis, and communication of patient information, AND Built-in safeguards against potential adverse events. II. EHR’s can help providers Improve Care Coordination AND Increase Patient Participation by offering follow-up information after an office visit or a hospital stay, such as self-care instructions, reminders
Telehealth services provided through the internet are vulnerable to hackers and other security breaches, therefore healthcare providers must take extra protection to ensure patient health information security (Fathi, Modin, &Scott, 2017). Another disadvantage of telehealth is poor personal patient-provider relationship. With telehealth technology, a patient often does not get a chance to bond with a healthcare provider because of lack of face-to face communication. This kind of gap in the relationship can lead to a patient’s poor health outcome. Finally, there may also be issues with inadequate assessment.
Introduction Telemedicine can identify as a new system that is used to advise medical practitioners, as well as offering the best medical service to all that makes use of Telemedicine. Many professions will find themselves in a cycle of technological innovation; however, many professions and institutions will find themselves having a problem to resist change, even if the change will lead to the improvement of the health care department. People that are not in favour of the implementation telemedicine are quick to argue about the potential ethical and legal problem associated with telemedicine (Stanberry, B). Most health professionals prefer to use the telephone as posed to telemedicine.
What is Unicode SMS? The term “Unicode SMS” refers to text messages sent and received containing characters not included in the default GSM character set. GSM stands for Global System for Mobile Communications (originally “Groupe Spécial Mobile”), and the GSM character set is a collection of the 128 letters (A-Z), numbers (0-9) and symbols (i.e. @, ?, !, &, etc.) most commonly used in mobile communications.
