Security Best Practices In Healthcare

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.

HIPAA and HITECH lay out strict standards governing information security and privacy of patient information. While HIPAA/HITECH may be a boon to the security of healthcare information, they also throw up a number of challenges like high costs, tracking regulatory changes, extensive documentation and several others. HITECH is the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, which brings additional compliance standards to healthcare organizations. It is directly related to HIPAA, and was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.EHR systems can also offer increased patient privacy & security when compared to traditional paper records. Encrypted electronic patient records can be protected against unauthorized

Automation and interconnections with information in their healthcare environments need increasing support, security measures need to be implemented without disrupting the workflow of approved users, costs associated with data breaches and damage to their reputation need to be avoided. IT budgets constraints also impose limitations in many healthcare institutions. Compliance with security and privacy related regulations in healthcare and making sure what policies and standards should be implemented requires solutions that clearly address security challenges so that they can be integrated into a healthcare institution’s existing infrastructure and business practice. As data is transmitted across countless environments and is stored on an ever-expanding grouping of endpoint and storage devices such as computers, laptops, and removable storage devices, it will become evident that there will be a need for strong encryption. Under the HITECH Act and comparable state laws, encrypted data that is received or acquired by unauthorized persons through a lost or stolen electronic device or an errant email, is typically not considered a breach. However, healthcare institutions need to determine the level of encryption they should adopt. For example, a hospital could decide where there is the greatest risk of information loss (patient data in email messages or on storage drive) that is not on internal

The HIPAA regulations define security as the health care providers are accountable for maintaining the confidentiality of individually identifiable health care information or the Patient Health Information(PHI). Excretion of the HIPAA Security Rule surrounds the following three vital shields for PHI in electronic form

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.

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

With growing scrutiny in healthcare and a record number of breaches increasing at an alarming rate, healthcare organizations are taking preventive measures in order to avoid breaches and possible fines. However, healthcare organizations are confused on what measures they need to take in order to protect healthcare information

One type of personal data we should be concerned with keeping secure is Protected Health Information or PHI. PHI is defined in the Privacy Rule section of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”) as “"individually identifiable health information" held or transmitted by a covered entity or its business associate, in any form or media, whether electronic, paper, or oral” (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services). While HIPAA was enacted to address the protection of PHI, it falls short of this task because there are no measures to proactively ensure entities are abiding by its guidelines, the penalties are subjective and fail to inflict enough punishment on entities for data breaches and it puts the onus

Since the adoption of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, there had been some modifications and interpretations made to its provisions to ensure that the requirements of the law are strictly adhered to. Thus, the “two sets of federal regulations were implemented… the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule” (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2015, p. 157). Briefly, the Privacy Rule addresses the limited use and disclosure of patients’ health information, while the Security Rule refers to the need to safeguard “patients’ health information from improper use or disclosure” (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2015, p. 157). The case scenario discussed in this paper relates to the Privacy Rule and Security Rule of HIPAA.

As Health information system continues to evolve and innovate the healthcare industries, one should be conscious of information security and safety. Kaiser Permanente experiences this dilemma first hand. On August 2000, Kaiser Permanente had a serious security breach that sends out email messages to their patients with another patient’s information. This integrated health delivery system serves over eight million members with appointments, prescription refills, health information, clinical advice and patient forums was breath and nineteen of the member received email messages with private information.

The expeditious increase in legal landscape in HIPAA, providing guidance to health organizations on the utilization of mobile devices and volunteering into the cloud is a multifaceted matter since there are unknown inherent security risks. Most lawmaking and guideline bodies are still contending with the privacy and data security implications in the cloud computing and mobile devices pertaining to health care. Therefore, health care organizations sorting to mobile device usage and cloud computing should bear in mind the security risks that it might carry and violations of the HIPAA policy.

Patients come to the hospital expecting high-quality treatment and also that their privacy will be respected. Data infiltration costs hospitals over 6 million dollars a year (Fields 2010). Thus, encryption of all data pertaining to both patients and employees is vital: preferably encryption that cannot be turned off 'at will' by careless employees. All employees, regardless of their position in the organizational hierarchy should receive training in best practices about how to manage data, including not opening suspicious emails and not leaving computers on without logging off of their accounts first. IT personnel should monitor organization-wide suspicious activity, such as unusual log-in times or repeated attempts to log in with incorrect passwords. All staff members should be required to frequently change their passwords and use complex combinations of words and letters.

As per federal laws HIPPA along with HITECH (health information technology for economic and clinical health act) governs the patient data security and protection.

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).