Health Information Exchange (HIE) is an electronic way for health care providers, patients, and payers to access and securely share medical information. There are data breaches everyday so patient and providers are concerned about the privacy and security of the HIE. Patients fear that sensitive health information related to dire diseases will be disclosed and used against them in decisions related to health insurance coverage or employment according to Mertz (2009, p.1). Providers are concerned that they will be breaking some health privacy laws of different states if they use a HIE. However, in essence as long as the HIE is following the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) Privacy and Security Rules then the provider and patients should be safe. This is because HIPPA regulates covered entities such as healthcare providers, health insurers, healthcare clearing houses. They all must follow HIPPA regulations when accessing, using and disclosing your medical information.
One main privacy and security concern when talking about a health information exchange is patient matching. Patient matching is used to match patients to medical records that come from multiple healthcare providers. According to Godlove and Ball there are two key elements to the use of HIE, “The first is confirming that the requesting and responding HIOs’ patients are one and the same. The second is confirming that the patient has consented to the exchange of the health information
Healthcare providers and patients have since been allowed to securely access and share medical information electronically using the electronic health information exchange (HIE) system, thus improving quality care, safety, cost and swiftness.
Health Information Exchange (HIE) has become a major component in today’s healthcare. Health information exchange provides a secure way for providers to appropriately access and electronically share a patient’s medical information. Therefore, reducing duplicate testing, minimizing medication errors and providing a link among electronic health records (EHR) in order to provide quality healthcare.
Use of an EHR presents major opportunities for the compromise of patient’s personal health information (PHI). The facility must ensure proper safe guards are implemented and functioning properly at all times. Employees need to be educated on the safety measures to prevent breach of patient confidential health records. Privacy breaches can result from misuse or improper storage of PHI by the healthcare professional, by third party payers, or by lack of proper encryption in the EHR system itself (Burkhardt & Nathaniel, 2014). The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a law that holds healthcare facilities and professionals accountable for keeping PHI confidential, patients to control
One of the challenges of health information exchange is privacy and security. Even though having electronic health information exchange reduces a lot of privacy and security issues, it raises new issues as well. A breach that formerly affected a single paper record now can expose an entire database of patient records. At the same time, health information exchange presents powerful new ways to improve the privacy and security of patients ' data, including encryption, authentication and authorization controls, and electronic audit trails. Two of the biggest challenges we’ve encountered are patient matching/master patient index synchronization issues and the vendors’ variable use of interoperability standards. The biggest issues we’ve experienced, so far are relate to the MPI synchronization of patients across all the entities. Public HIEs, as well as the private HIE vendors, should focus on this challenge. Technically, interoperable platforms, EHR’s, are often hindered by the inability to determine an exact patient match, because the eMPI solutions aren’t robust enough. This also potentially creates data integrity and patient safety issues, if the clinical data goes across multiple records. There also some struggles with the variable use of the interoperability standards between the EHR vendors. One of
Healthcare technology has grown and evolved over time. With the conversion to electronic medical records and the creation of social media just to name a few, ensuring patient privacy is of the utmost importance for healthcare facilities in this day and age. In order for an organization to avoid hefty fines, it is imperative that a healthcare administrator maintains compliance with the standards and regulations associated with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This paper will provide a summary
Although the EHR is still in a transitional state, this major shift that electronic medical records are taking is bringing many concerns to the table. Two concerns at the top of the list are privacy and standardization issues. In 1996, U.S. Congress enacted a non-for-profit organization called Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This law establishes national standards for privacy and security of health information. HIPAA deals with information standards, data integrity, confidentiality, accessing and handling your medical information. They also were designed to guarantee transferred information be protected from one facility to the next (Meridan, 2007). But even with the HIPAA privacy rules, they too have their shortcomings. HIPAA can’t fully safeguard the limitations of who’s accessible to your information. A short stay at your local
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
Modern communications capabilities open up a world of possibilities for all types of medical practices to develop deeper connections with their patients and to manage health care remotely. The HIPAA Privacy Rule gives patients the right to obtain copies of their medical records, treatments and protected health information or PHI. These requirements go further if medical providers want to receive reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid -- patients must be able to access their records online, download copies and transmit the information to third-party providers. Most medical practices are finding it necessary to develop patient portals where patients and physicians can interact, share information and perform important functions such as practices billing patients and accepting payments online. HIPAA 's rules require that these patient portals have strong security and privacy protections to prevent unauthorized access of these confidential PHI records.
A Health Information Exchange, or HIE, is technology that enables the electronic movement of health-related information among health care providers and others. HIEs are an
Taking a tour through the ages, Kuperman focused a great deal of attention on the Direct Project. “The constrained information flows supported by Direct and other push models of HIE leverage existing privacy frameworks,”(1). Kuperman wrote. “The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT Privacy and Security Tiger Team recently recommended that for Stage 1 meaningful use, directed exchange of health information for treatment should not require patient consent beyond what is required to make a disability determination law or has been customary practice.” Federal privacy guidelines for more complicated models of HIE, for example, retrieving a patient's health data from multiple sources with a single query, have yet to be created,”(1), the author added.
Health information exchange (HIE) delivers information when and where it is needed to provide improvements in healthcare quality and efficiency. HIE requires essential coding standards throughout health information management so that information can be accessed, merged, divided and/or shared with other healthcare organizations. In order to reach interoperability; message, exchange, and terminological standards are a few key attributes needed. HL7 v2, CDA and RxNorm aid in reaching these standards to achieve HIE.
In today’s fragmented healthcare system, clinical decisions are made based on the available information. Unfortunately, the available information is not always complete. Patients have been using an increasing number of providers and health systems, many of which have no way to effectively communicate clinical information. This forces healthcare providers to make decisions based on incomplete information at the cost of outcomes to the patients and dollars to the health system. It is estimated that the use of health information exchange (HIE) could save $78 billion in healthcare costs per year (Shortliffe, 2014, p425). A concerted effort to solve this problem began in 2009, when The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
When it comes to healthcare there are a lot of things that have evolved. One in particular is that of the patients’ health care records and how they are written as well as being stored. In this paper I will be discussing the evolution of this process via the Health Information Exchange or HIE. This will involve the history of the system, problems that are involved in this evolution, as well as the security issues that will need to be addressed when moving from different types of records.
Health Information Exchange is the electronic movement of healthcare information amongst organizations according to the national standards. HIE as it is widely known, serves the purpose of providing a safe, timely, and efficient way of accessing or retrieving patient clinical data. Health Information Exchange allows for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other vital healthcare professionals to have appropriate access and securely share vital medical information regarding patient care. Health Information Exchange has been in efforts of developing for over 20 years in the United States. In 1990 the Community Health Management Information Systems (CHMIS) program was formed by the Hartford Foundation to foster a development of a centralized data repository in seven different geographically defined communities. Many of the communities struggled in securing a cost-effective technology with interoperable data sources and gaining political support. In the mid-1990s a similar initiative began known as the Community Health Information Networks (CHINs) with the intention of sharing data between providers in a more cost-effective manner. In 2004, the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research Health Information Technology Portfolio was funded $166 million in grants and contracts to improve the quality and safety to support more patient-centered care. This was the beginning of the progress we have seen in HIE today. Health Information Exchange devolvement serves the purpose of improving
The Health information exchange or also known as HIE is the sending of healthcare-related data electronically to facilities, health information organizations and government agencies according to national standards. The goal is to be able to access and retrieve data more efficient, safer, and to improve the quality of care and patient safety and reduce healthcare costs.