Improper Admission Orders From Morphine Overdose And Death

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.

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

Typically, HIPAA regulations cover both security and privacy of protected health information. Security and privacy are dissimilar, but go hand-in-hand. The Privacy rule emphasizes the right of an individual to control the use of his or her personal information. Protected health information (PHI) should not be disclosed or used by others against their wishes. The Privacy rule covers the confidentiality of PHI in all formats including electronic, paper, and oral (Sullivan, 2014). Privacy is a promise that the information will be protected from unauthorized disclosure. The somatic security of PHI in all systems is an element of the Privacy rule. The Security rule concentrates on administrative, technical, and physical safeguards since they relate to electronic PHI (ePHI) (Koontz, 2012). Protection of ePHI data from unapproved access, whether external or internal, stored or in transit, is included in the security rule. Health care providers for example, transmit health information electronically, through clearinghouses, and health plans are all protected by the Privacy Rule (Koontz, 2012). The Security Rule is exclusive to electronic PHI. It should be notated, that electronic PHI also incorporates telephone voice response and faxback systems since they are utilized as input and output devices for computers. However,

Any patient that is seen by a physician within the United States is to be protected by the “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act” or HIPAA, which was passed into law in 1996 (Jani, 2009). All health care facilities dealing with any protected health information (PHI) are to ensure that all physical/electronic processes are safeguarded from any third party entity or unauthorized personnel according to HIPAA. All health care data to include any medical insurance

2. What are the civil and criminal penalties for misappropriation of personal health information (PHI)?

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) indicates that HIPAA violations have been generally increasing throughout the years. Now that electronically maintained patient information exists, it has become increasingly difficult to limit information sharing in a manner that guarantees usage for its intended genesis. Personal information travels across several channels, to include healthcare providers, third party payers, and other business associates. Few controls exist to regulate how this information is maintained, or disseminated. If state law or local legislation does not forbid accessing patient health records or sharing patient information, any information held by a provider or business associate could be passed

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)

2) Healthcare Organizations conduct due diligence in protecting sensitive information on a daily basis with their most sensitive information type would be Protected Health Information (PHI) as well as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Most enterprise organizations take great measures ensuring the protection of PII through proper handling or utilizing encryption as it can lead to identity theft for the affected victim. PHI is defined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) signed in 1996 as information relating to the following:

Privacy concerns in healthcare apply to both paper and electronic records. Today records can be exchanged over the Internet and they are subject to the same security concerns as any other type of data transaction over the Internet. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) were passed in the US in 1996 to establish rules for access, authentications, storage and auditing, and transmittal of electronic medical records. This standard made restrictions for electronic records more stringent than those for paper records. However, there are concerns as to the adequacy of implementation of this standard. As the ever-changing healthcare industry evolves, one key topic within the electronic health record (EHR) is privacy. The Federal government has set guidelines that all healthcare organizations will have to comply with in regards to electronic health transactions. Most supporters believe that the EHR will improve care and reduced costs, while transforming the health care system, but whether the privacy of the

In enacting HIPAA, Congress mandated the establishment of Federal standards for the security of electronic protected health information (e-PHI). The purpose of the Security Rule is to ensure that every covered entity has implemented safeguards to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronic protected health information. Standards for security are needed because there is a growth in the exchange of protected health information between covered entities as well as non-covered entities. (“Health Information Privacy,” n.d.).

The advancement of modern technology and the fast pace progress of Electronic Health Records (EHR); is allowing medical information to become more susceptible to fraud. Therefore the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, was enforced in order to help with the following: simplify administration of health insurance, improve long-term health care, promote medical savings accounts, and combat waste, fraud, abuse within the health insurance and health care delivery. HIPAA policies hold standards that regulate and enforces privacy and securities act as a way to help ensure that protected health information (PHI) confidential. The purpose of the following information is to inform about how data security

Healthcare information technology is a growing and promising, tool with the goal of improving quality, safety, and efficiency of the delivery of healthcare. But with this technology comes possible risk of security breaches. It is imperative to run risk analysis and apply technical safeguards to protect confidential healthcare information. The Office of Civil Rights along with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule protect the public’s rights of nondiscrimination and health information privacy (Sayles, 2013). In addition, the Patient Safety Act and Rule establish a voluntary reporting system to enhance the data available to assess and resolve patient safety and health care quality issues (Sayles, 2013). In the following cases breaches of confidentiality were reported, a violation of the law, and enforcement was set in place. Herein, the cases will be summarized and the principal threats will be highlighted. A sample security plan with for a medium sized organization will be included along with a critique of the plan.

Health care has an obligation to protect patient information and make sure that their information is only accessed by those involved in the patient’s care or by those whose job requires them to access that information. The purpose of this paper is to review the intent of the electronic heath record (EHR) along with the mandates related to them and review the steps on how to implement EHR. I will relate meaningful use, which is one of the steps of implementing an electronic health record, and how my own facility is attaining it. I will also discuss HIPAA laws and how patient confidentiality could be threatened by improperly using EHR.

One of the major events that occurred in the 1990s was President Clinton signing a law regarding Health Insurance and Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. This law was created to provide more affordable and accessible health insurance, provisions to simplify administrative processes and to provide protection of Personal Health Information (Wager, 2009). In regards to simplifying administrative processes, this law mandates development of a central electronic data base to contain all health records for every patient in the United States. This law did not mandate a federal policy which protects this information if misused or stolen until Feb. 21, 2000 (Bacon, 1997, pg. 317). Since many medical records that used to be stored in filing cabinets with minimal access are now being stored on computer networks, information can be easily copied, accessed and redistributed. This has resulted in the development of increased information