Ghc300 Week 3

Use of an EHR presents major opportunities for the compromise of patient’s personal health information (PHI). The facility must ensure proper safe guards are implemented and functioning properly at all times. Employees need to be educated on the safety measures to prevent breach of patient confidential health records. Privacy breaches can result from misuse or improper storage of PHI by the healthcare professional, by third party payers, or by lack of proper encryption in the EHR system itself (Burkhardt & Nathaniel, 2014). The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a law that holds healthcare facilities and professionals accountable for keeping PHI confidential, patients to control

With the enthusiasm for health information technology, potential risks and problems associated with electronic health records have received far less attention. Three fundamental security goals are essential to EHR systems: confidentiality, integrity and availability (Haas e26). Patients lose the protection of implied trust domain of medical institutions due to their medical record maintenance performed by non-medical enterprises (e27). Depending on the paradigm, enabling access to an increased number of users poses threats to security and privacy.

Although the EHR is still in a transitional state, this major shift that electronic medical records are taking is bringing many concerns to the table. Two concerns at the top of the list are privacy and standardization issues. In 1996, U.S. Congress enacted a non-for-profit organization called Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This law establishes national standards for privacy and security of health information. HIPAA deals with information standards, data integrity, confidentiality, accessing and handling your medical information. They also were designed to guarantee transferred information be protected from one facility to the next (Meridan, 2007). But even with the HIPAA privacy rules, they too have their shortcomings. HIPAA can’t fully safeguard the limitations of who’s accessible to your information. A short stay at your local

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the electronic health record mandate. Who started it and when? I will discuss the goals of the mandate. I will discussion will how the Affordable Care Act ties into the mandate of Electronic Health Record. It will describe my own facility’s EHR and what steps are been taken to implement it. I will describe the term “meaningful use,” and it will discuss possible threats to patient confidentiality and the what’s being done by my facility to prevent Health Information and Portability Accountability Act or HIPAA violations.

Regulation placed upon the healthcare system only seek to improve safety and security of the patients we care for. The enactment of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and the enactment of Meaningful Use Act the United States government has set strict regulations on the security of health information and has allotted for stricter penalties for non-compliance. The advancement of electronic health record (EHR) systems has brought greater fluidity and compliance with healthcare but has also brought greater security risk of protected information. In order to ensure compliance with government standards organizations must adapt

Due to the high risk to information systems, many organizations do not conduct a periodic risk analysis and are not able to know where they stand. This may seem blatantly obvious, but it is something many of the healthcare organizations continue to wonder about. In order to improve the effectiveness and proficiency of the health care system, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), Public Law 104-191, includes Administrative Simplification requirements for HHS to accept national standards for electronic health care operations and code sets, unique health identifiers, and security (Sullivan, 2014). Enforcement of the Privacy Rule that began on April 14, 2003 for most HIPAA covered objects.

There were concerns related to risks of hackers, malware attacks, password changes which can be disruptive to the clinical workflow and can lead to inefficiency. Human errors, inadequate knowledge and ability to use PHR (health literacy). Are the patients aware of the HIPAA regulations? Some patients of a particular age group refrain from using PHR. Interoperability which is the core purpose of electronic health records is also one of the primary concerns. The use of unauthorized USB drives can lead to the malware attack which may interoperability. The other questions that needs to be answered is despite encryption, firewalls which have been initiated to maintain security, there are still concerns about data security

The hospital will establish policies and standards that protect patient privacy of the health care information. These policies should determine levels of access to the EHR. The Cerner® system will provide many layers of protection. A major piece of maintaining patient privacy is managing access to the EHR. This is accomplished through password management. The system will require case sensitive passwords with mandated password change every 90 days. There is employee badge swipe access that automatically enters the user log in ID but requires the password be entered. If a user has not accessed the system in a designated time period, which will be determined by the hospital (typically 90 days) then the system will automatically drop the

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed by congress in 1996, and helps to ensure the privacy and security of Electronic Health Records (EHR's). By following the rules and regulations set forth under HIPAA, we can ensure the safety of patients' EHR's. We are responsible for protecting patients' records, and there are many measures we can take in order do this. Firstly, we must always keep patients' health information private. This means no discussing the records with people that are not authorized to know, and even then, we should only disclose the minimum necessary amount of information possible. For covered entities, we must designate a privacy and security officer to ensure the privacy

Lately I have been hearing a lot about security of patient’s health records and how people are losing their jobs behind accessing information that they have no need to be in. It got me to wondering just how secure our personal information is from prying eyes and how who is alerted when these prying eye are in information that doesn’t concern them. So, when I ran across this article “Security Audits of Electronic Health Information” and “HIPAA Security Rule Overview” it caught my eye and curiosity on how they might work hand in hand when it comes to protecting what information is accessed by personnel. So, I choose these articles to get more information on this topic.

The breach of patients’ confidential information does not only jeopardize our reputation and reduce the public trust in our organization, it could also lead to severe financial consequences. Under HIPAA law, if an organization is found guilty of unauthorized disclosure of patient medical record, they could face prison time harsh privacy violation penalty. We are sure that none of us want this to happen to our organization. So how can we prevent medical record security leak and better protect our patients’ privacy while also providing the best care possible to all our patients? The following guidelines and

For healthcare organizations, the risk of data breach attack has become so high with the introduction of Electronic Medical Records. Such situations are attributable to the fact that organizations have adopted use of electronic systems without putting into consideration security measures. In such cases, healthcare organizations engage nurses who are not qualified to use the systems or do not have any IT security knowledge. Lack of database security measures in healthcare organizations makes the organization vulnerable for data breach (McMillan, 2011).

When working in the healthcare system you have access to very important sensitive information. This information can be used to commit several crimes. An easy simple way to protect you and your patients are by using strong passwords. Strong passwords are considerably harder to crack or break and that’s even with the powerful password cracking software that is available today. Your health organization should have a mandatory password policy put in place. This policy will dictate that passwords must be strong, Is at least seven characters long, does not contain your user name, real name, or company name. Does not contain a complete dictionary word. Is significantly different from previous passwords, and also be changed after a set period of time.

The department of Health and Human Services protects and guides the health and well being of individuals here in America (Thacker, 2014). They fulfill these duties providing Americans with adequate and efficient health and human services and monitoring services designed to increase the efficiency of care in the health system (Thacker, 2014). One of the services being monitored by the department of Health and Human Services is the electronic health record system, which carries private and vital information of patient’s health record enabling all eligible participating health workers access to these records (Thacker, 2014). A breach of the protective health information of patients in a health organization creates chaos as these are against the health insurance portability and accountability (HIPAA) law (Thacker, 2014). Hence, measure will have to be put in place to determine what caused the breach and how to rectify it to ensure the breach never happens again (Thacker, 2014).

In a world full of electronics it would only seem logical to have health records electronic. Not only are medical records efficient, reliable, and quick to access, new technology allow patients to access their own personal medical records with a simple to use login and password. “People are asking whether any kind of electronic records can be made safe. If one is looking for a 100% privacy guarantee, the answer is no”(Thede, 2010). At my hospital, upon every admission we ask the patient for a password for friends and family to have to have if they would like an update on the patient 's condition. We do not let visitors come up and see the patient without the patient 's consent. In doing these things, we help to ensure the safety and protection of the patient 's health information and privacy.