New Technologies and Free Speech Technology has changed drastically over the years since the enactment of HIPAA and healthcare has changed just as much. Healthcare providers are having to keep up with the technology to stay in compliance with HIPAA and not be fined. Nowadays, people can perform affordable electronic health records (EHRs) for patients and health information exchanges (HIEs) that helps doctors share patient data (N.A., The 5 Biggest Challenges Facing Healthcare Data Security Today, 2014). HIEs help any patient transmit health information to a specialist doctor from the patient’s primary doctor. While having a network that will store large quantities of patient’s medical data that can be shared between multiple providers, …show more content…
This provides a hacker easy access to your health information. According to (N.A., The 5 Biggest Challenges Facing Healthcare Data Security Today, 2014), “It is estimated that 80% of healthcare data is expected to “pass through the cloud at some point in its lifetime” by 2020.” As healthcare providers are making it convenient for their patients by using an app to access their health information from their phone, that does leave them vulnerable with the cloud and mobile devices. Encrypting data in the cloud is easier to access in the cloud versus the user of an application. This requires hospitals to be more cautious of their security and bring your own device policies to make sure they are in compliance with HIPAA in using the cloud and mobile devices (N.A., The 5 Biggest Challenges Facing Healthcare Data Security Today, 2014). Healthcare providers are fully aware of the fines imposed on them if they violate HIPAA rules in giving information on a patient without approval. However, patients are not aware of the risk they are taking when they post on a social media sight of a medical issue they have had with a doctor. They may feel that they are exercising their free speech in notifying their family and friends about this doctor. But when the doctor may run across this post and checks the patient’s medical records and wants to defend themselves, that puts the doctor at risk of a HIPAA