Hospital Security Breach

Ultimately, the software, equipment and cloud solutions the companies and vendors provide will have to demonstrate a high quality of security and reliability. Patients’ private medical data as well as their lives are at risk in this new arena of technology.

In the health care business, there are certain standards and laws that have been put in place to protect our patients and their personal health information. When a health care facility fails to protect their patient’s confidential information, the US Government may get involved and facilities may be forced to pay huge sums of money in fines, and risk damaging their reputation.

Myranda Aguilar has been working in health care for 15 years and for the past two years she’s been working as a privacy analyst for Sutter Health located in Sacramento California. As a privacy analyst her duties are protection of patients’ privacy, compliance, and information security. Her responsibilities are to monitor and investigate any suspicious activity by taking a proactive standpoint against hackers, educate hospital staff on how to protect patients’ privacy, and ensure patients safety during their stay in the hospital. She works with elected board members of the health committee program she works for. One of the projects that she is currently working on is privacy auditing and monitoring where she tracks patients records to determine

With today’s advancement in technology, most hospitals have developed a data security plan to ensure that patient data is being handled correctly and is only viewed by authorized personnel. Hospitals can keep unauthorized personnel from viewing patient information by setting up individual passwords (Wager, Lee, & Glaser, 2013) only allowing those employees to view the patient’s information for them to complete their job task. When an employee is entering information into the system, it needs to be in real time as much as possible to keep human errors from occurring and for a correction to be made there will need to be a note attached to

In order to minimize the risks for potential privacy breaches, the health information management (HIM) director has to understand all facets of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). This should include conducting an audit of their practices. In this scenario, an audit would have been useful to detect the improper access by the employee sooner. HIPAA uses both its privacy and security regulations to “protect consumer’s health information, allow consumers greater access and control to such information, enhance health care, and finally to create a national framework for health care privacy protection” (Amaguin, n.d.). These privacy and security regulations serve as the “only national set of regulations that governs

With the introduction of information technology advancement into the hospital health care system, we must embrace in this technology and must ensure that we have a more efficient and secure system. This will allow us to create measures that will allow us to protect electronic protected health information (ePHI). All data that is being transmitted on any open networks will be protected from any cyber attackers or unauthorized personnel. In order to protect this data, any ePHI data will be sent by encrypting the data to ensure that in the event that it is intercepted it

A breach investigation begins with an automated system that sends an alert to privacy managers via a report that someone has accessed information that does not pertain to them. The privacy manager will then look at the report to see what was accessed and by whom. He/she will then collect the information in order to provide it to the employee’s department manager. During this process, the privacy manager will take into account why the employee may have accessed the information and if any significant harm was done to the patient by doing so. After the privacy manager talks with the employee’s departmental manager, they will then confront the staff member to find out their intent. If the situation was severe, the Human Resources will then be contacted. See attachment

There was an attempt to address the security risk by enabling electronic care record access through smart cards but on the same time it was agreed that medical staff can share their personal smart cards to access patient records which in itself looks like a breach to patient confidentiality and security.

In the current era of digitization, with all the data being converted from paper to electronic records, even the healthcare industry has become so dependent on technology. As hospitals are adopting electronic means for data storage, medical results, transactions and billing, utmost care is to be taken to protect a patient’s personal privacy by protecting their electronic health records, which is only possible by enhancing the security and privacy of the hospital’s network. This paper proposes certain security mechanisms for a more controlled and safer access to the healthcare provider’s network, thus being aware of every device trying to access the network and making sure only authorized devices are able to connect, with the help of measures such as, intrusion detection systems to continuously monitor the network, firewalls to ensure endpoint devices comply with security policies and biometrics for identity based network access control.

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.

Providing a high quality of care and monitor patient safety may be a challenge, by having patients’ record organize and store in the systems be electronically retrieved and sees can cause a glitch. But through the process to having IT create a stronger surveillance technology and encryption to prevent the hacker from entering patient information and combatting medication errors. This system will improve communication with clinician or physician, expand medical knowledge, and monitoring patient information

In today’s society, medical records becomes a huge issue. In many organizations such as healthcare, patient confidentiality becomes a high concern. Having internet health services, creates a challenge for compliance in healthcare. Providers have treated application security and infrastructure security independently until now. Access must be secured for clinical applications to alleviate the concern from providers in healthcare. Therefore, IT infrastructure must be protected from hackers, misusing information as well as thieves. (FairWarning, n.d.)

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.

This research article examines the security concerns of using mobile technology systems in health care institution. Various methods of ensuring privacy and security of patient’s electronic medical information are addressed. This high quality article is relevant for present day mobile security issues. The authors utilize a host of credible references in the health care and information technology fields.