Health Informatics Research Paper

Data security is used to prevent anything that is unauthorized, and it helps to protect all of the data from any corruption. Almost daily, media reports highlight the failure of health care organizations to safeguard the privacy and security of patient data, whether electronic or paper. Preventing data breaches has become more complex, and at the same time, the fines being levied against health care organizations for violating the Health Insurance, (Zamosky, 2014).# In this paper, I will discuss the security measures, how the security measures used and how well did the security measure work.

Pharmaceutical companies, insurance agencies, research hospitals, and countless medical practices must take safeguards to secure health information. It’s vital to surviving in our competitive marketplace.

Hospitals have put in place widespread security and privacy measures to protect patient health information. However, there are still errors being made in data security through the IT standpoint. Some of these errors or issues include:

Working in the medical field with Electronic Health Records, a lot of my responsibilities are reliant on Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPPA) compliance, EHR updates and template building. EHR breaches in security is a constant concern in this age of modern and sophisticated technology. With recent security breaches of major corporations, this has caused technology experts to heighten its security encryptions to prevent further breaches. The increasing concern over the security of health information stems from the rise of EHRs, increased use of mobile devices such as the smartphone, medical identity theft, and the widely anticipated exchange of data between and among organizations, clinicians, federal agencies, and patients. If patients’ trust is undermined, they may not be forthright with the physician. For the patient to trust the clinician, records in the office must be protected. Having the knowledge of how these security breaches are on the rise increases my awareness on the security protection of the health records.

The health care is changing with the advent of Electronic health record. EHR improves coordinated care and promotes easy access to patient care. This helps in improved patient involvement in healthcare and also make them to be better informed. However, there are security and privacy concerns while using EHR systems. Therefore, different security principles are needed to be applied to EHR systems. Information security (InfoSec) principles helps in protecting EHR systems. This principle includes the following:The information is not available to everyone and are not disclosed to unauthorized individuals, processes and entities. Measures are undertaken to ensure that sensitive information should not reach the wrong people while making right information

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.

Systemic literature review, Security and Privacy in electronic health records, selected 49 articles, but they approved only 26 that were using standards related to the privacy and security of EHR. The protection and security of personal information is critical in the health sector and there are three fundamental security goals, Confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA). According to the ISO EN13606 standard, confidentiality refers to the ‘‘process that ensures that information is accessible only to those authorized to have access to it’’. (Fernandez - Aleman, 2013)Integrity refers to the duty to ensure that information is accurate and is not modified in an unauthorized fashion. The integrity of health information must therefore be protected to ensure patient safety, and one important component of this protection is that of ensuring that the information’s entire life cycle is fully auditable. Availability refers to the ‘‘property of being accessible and useable upon demand by an authorized entity’’. (Fernandez - Aleman, 2013)

The rules in "Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996" require that organizations will create policies and procedures to prevent unauthorized access to health care information. All persons who maintain and transmit health information apply reasonable technical and physical safeguards to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of such information and unauthorized uses or disclosures. However the existing problems of security of data are not yet fully overcome and the existing problems relating to patient record confidentiality and the impact

When building e-health system to record patients’ data, it should comply with security standards such as HIPAA and HL7. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule provides guidelines to ensure the privacy and security of health data (Acharya et al. 2013), and the Health Level Seven International (HL7) provides the structure of health data and the framework for information exchange (Singh et al. 2013).

Healthcare providers need to have quick access to all of a patient's medical information whenever and wherever the patient goes for care. There are systems to help standardize electronic medical records, such as the National Health Information Infrastructure, which would help provide qucik and easy access to the patient's information. The department of Health and Human Services has made an effort to proctect the privacy of all medical records by enacting a Privacy Rule under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. These regulations were designed to help protect a patients' identifiable health information that is provided to health plans, hospitalts, doctors, and any other healthcare providers. The personal information that

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.

Note: This content is especially associated with the work you will be doing in HIM 6520.

Privacy of health information has become an area of emphasis across the healthcare industry. It is important to understand what data is protected under federal regulations, how it can be shared, and how to prevent any accidental exposure of protected data. It is possible that data that should be protected can be exposed without anyone even realizing a violation has occurred. Exposure of protected healthcare data can result in medical identity theft and is therefore a very important and hot topic. The security and privacy of healthcare data is necessary to ensure consumer confidence in the healthcare industry and to prevent medical identity theft.

Information security and privacy is occupying a most important role in the healthcare territory in order to deliver protected information process to their patients (Appari, & Johnson, 2010). As healthcare department is the organization with vast data and essential information the hospitals has to keep a useful information security technique in their enterprise process (Mishra et al., 2011). Information security is one such phase in the healthcare sphere which is extremely problematic to describe and evaluate even to the individuals who are working on the process. In the healthcare organization, information is of many types which required for the work and even the security is a main control for almost all the practices which are transmitted out in the healthcare field (Appari, & Johnson, 2010). Hospitals, in specific, have been instructed to create a new set of security specialists to protect healthcare data tools techniques upon which exists may rely. Healthcare data is very critical for patients because it is very confidential records. If a medical apparatus is filled with a computer virus it can even exemplify a possibility to patients ' lives. Hence, hospitals should design alertness of the risk, to defend against concerns to healthcare databanks and be concerned about the high risk of infected computers or medical tools being connected to their networks (Mishra et al., 2011).

In light of available security measures and their widespread acceptance within the information security community, there is no excuse for healthcare organizations to fail in fulfilling their duty to protect personal patient information. Guaranteeing the confidentiality and privacy of data in healthcare information is crucial in safeguarding the data of patients as there should be a legal responsibility to protect medical records from unauthorized access.