Health Informatics Research Paper

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.

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.

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

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)

Health information technology privacy and security standards are essential to maintaining interoperability and security in the exchange of health information. Standards provide a common language between different systems that need to share information (Himss.org, 2016). These standards are relevant to healthcare providers to gain access to health records from another facility as to streamline patient care. A more effective and efficient way for a provider to obtain information is to have a provider log- into a device to see results. In gaining access to health information, it is critical to maintaining security. With easy access to information come concerns for securing that information. Security standards provide protection over electronic protected health information.

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

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

With the adoption of health information technology like electronic health records, it has failed to meet the expectation of making it cost efficient and safer. But even with the high expectations of quality and patient security there has been numerous reasons found to why there are safety hazards which are sometimes referred to as “e-iatrogenesis”. (Bowman,2013) Electronic health records issue evolved due to data being lost and entered incorrectly which has led the loss of information integrity. Therefore, hackers go for the health care industry. Being that health care organization hold onto to “personally indefinable information, such as credit card details, names and email addresses” (Budd, 2016) makes it an easy target because most healthcare facilities don’t invest in money on

Biomedical Informatics is a very diverse field. It interfaces with other fields such as computer science, computer programing, and information technology. Biomedical informatics includes five different domains, such as translational bioinformatics, clinical research Informatics, clinical informatics, public health informatics and Consumer health informatics. Biomedical informatics has trained people to go work in clinical and non-clinical settings. The domains are the specialties of this field and people working within these domains have different responsibilities. They all share common goal to enhance the practices of medicine to provide better care for humanity.

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.

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.)

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).

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