1.0 Introduction and Background of the Study Privacy is an underlying governing principle of the patient-physician relationship for effective delivery of healthcare. Patients are required to share information with their physicians to facilitate correct diagnosis and determination of treatment, especially to avoid adverse drug interactions. However patients may refuse to disclose important information in cases of health problems such as psychiatric behavior and HIV as their disclosure may lead to social stigma and discrimination. Over time, a patient’s medical record accumulates significant personal information including identification, history of medical diagnosis, digital renderings of medical images, treatment received medication …show more content…
Extended Enterprise Figure 1.1: Typical Information flow in a Healthcare System On the other hand, one must also protect sensitive patient information from being distributed to unauthorized persons, that is, one should strive to maintain patient privacy. Patient information is thus a critical factor in healthcare and should follow the patient during the whole patient process even if the patient visits more than one healthcare provider, that is, in distributed healthcare. Protecting patient information has always been a high priority within the healthcare domain. When electronic healthcare records (EHR) are used, the availability of patient information increases. Think for instance of the medical information of patients: a typical hospital is visited by thousands of patients each year and for each patient, the hospital needs to store contact details, insurance information, appointments with medical specialists, and a medical data: medical reports, radiography pictures, laboratory results and more. Medical professionals need to access
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
Recent developments in technology have changed the delivery of health care and the system used to record and retrieve health information. In addition to using paper medical records, healthcare professionals, hospitals and insurers routinely use computers, phones, faxes, and other methods or recording and transferring information. In many instances, this information - which could include medical diagnoses, prescriptions, or insurance information - is readily available to anyone (including clerical and other staff) who walks by a fax machine or logs on to a computer. This lack of privacy has the potential to undermine patients' relationships with providers and adversely affect the quality of care. Patients may also fear that the exposure of personal health information, including the results of genetic tests that are becoming increasing available, could result in the loss or denial of health insurance, job discrimination or personal embarrassment.
Patient privacy has been a major concern for patients and medical staff for many years. Patient privacy goes hand in hand with HIPPA and the privacy rule. This protects the privacy of any person of all health information (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010). Even with this a concern for many, a study conducted by Zogby Internation studies more than 2000 adults to obtain their views on patient privacy. This studied determined that individuals would rather have individual choice and control over personal health information instead of others (Patient Privacy Rights, 2010).
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
Not protecting data integrity and when it is available - any healthcare institution should realize that it is necessary to protect healthcare data's confidentiality and that protecting the integrity and availability of the data is also important.
In today’s world of technology patient’s face an ever challenging issue of protecting their privacy. One of the biggest areas infringing on a patient’s privacy would be the prescription health information that is being released by pharmacists and the way in which that information is used. Information is given to a wide variety of entities and to individuals, which raises enormous concern about the privacy rights of patients, especially considering the fact that the patient has not given consent for the release of this information.
Privacy and security to assure that individuals trust the exchange of their healthcare information into a system that protects their information as it is shared between health care entities. These security measures are being constructed on the federal and state levels to assure the safe transmission of patient’s healthcare information and that the public’s trust is established in these security
A patient’s right to privacy is one of the most important and protected elements of healthcare today. Patient health information is protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and even more so by the HIPAA Privacy Rule. “The HIPAA Privacy Rule is a key federal law governing the privacy and confidentiality of patient information.” (Brodnik, Rinehart-Thompson, Reynolds. 2012 pg. 215.) The law governing patient privacy has two goals, “to provide an individual with greater rights with
Respecting the patients’ privacy has always been an important aspect of the physicians practice. This is because health related matters are often private and no patient would want their private information accessible to anyone other than those directly involved in their case. The goals of HIPAA are to increase patient health information use and disclosure control, increase patient access to their records, limit health information use, secure transactions and storage, and establish legal accountabilities and penalties (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 186). In the post HIPAA environment there are less opportunities for the wrong people to get their hands on patient records. The information obtained at each patient flow checkpoint is broken up so that the information that is specifically needed for each department is available for only that department. For example, billing information gets sent and stored in a financial database (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 189). The billing employees only see the data related to the billing and not medical, treatment, or procedure specifics. Mainly, patients want to know what a physician is doing to protect their privacy (Hartley & Jones, 2014, Chapter 5). There is usually a reason as to why a patient expresses extra concern regarding his privacy. For example: A teenager is experimenting with drugs and calls the office for help, a man tests positive for hepatitis C and feels like he may lose his job,
HIPAA privacy rules protect patients ' privacy and provide patients access to their medical records. The security standards include certain integrity, privacy, and physical safeguards component, protecting computer systems and network system from physical intrusion and hazards. This security measure is headed in the right direction to display the steps needed to protect all data and procedures by regulations. With HIPPA rules in place, an individual has the right to request any of the entities that the electronic protected health information shows that are not accurate. To ensure al privacy steps has been taken it will involves communications between the medical organization database medical staff and the patient who has requested information to remain as secret. A Good example would be when an individual give medical office his work number to use as a form of communication , in place of his or cellular or home phone number.
(HIPAA) rules and principles on how the importance of protecting privacy in health information is essential to enhancing quality care[1]. Due to the reason, individuals revealed concern in regards with the privacy and insecure of their health personal information. Hence, to solving this issues the author has demonstrated six parts of how the individual privacy is very important to protect and secure. The first part describes the background information of the health privacy. See
It is important for the both the patient and health care provider to understand what information is being protected, as to avoid any security breach. This protected information included any information in various medical records, patient conversations with all health care professionals about care and treatment, billing data, and a majority of other information regarding patient health. Any patient has the right to see and receive a copy of any health records, request correction be made to a variety of health-related information, control over who the medical records are shared with,
Patients have the right to their privacy that shouldn't be infringed without informed consent. Any patients information shouldn't be distributed to others without a patient's consent. Patients privacy is essential for establishing an effective relationship between a medical and maintaining the patient's security. At any given point a patient has the right to see their information.
Privacy and confidentiality are basic rights in our society. Safeguarding those rights, with respect to an individual’s personal health information, is our ethical and legal obligation as health care providers. Doing so in today’s health care environment is increasingly challenging (OJIN, 2005).
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.