The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has set out the creation and maintenance of electronic health records (EHR) as the means by which patient care can be improved while the overall costs of healthcare to society can be driven down. However, the ability to consolidate patient records and increase their portability has increased their vulnerability to theft and exposure. Along with the requirement to create EHRs, HIPAA has mandated security requirements for a class of information identified as electronic protected health information (ePHI) in an effort to protect the confidentiality of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from criminal misuse and general exposure. The iTrust Medical Care Requirements System (iTrust)
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 increasingly dominates the nursing landscape. Safeguarding private patient information is not just important. It is becoming more technical with the introduction of Electronic Medical Records (EMR), training on the technology, safeguarding EMR and the complications of outsourcing of EMR management to contractors.
Protecting the privacy of patient information is one of the top priorities of all healthcare providers and is specifically required by various state and federal laws. On February 17, 2009 the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, sometimes referred to as “the stimulus”) included provisions making significant improvement in the privacy and security standards for health information was signed into law by the federal government (http://www.hpsafind.hrsa.gov). Included in this law is $19.2 Billion which is intended to be used to increase the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) by physicians and hospitals; this portion of the bill is called, the Health
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.
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
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
With the enthusiasm for health information technology, potential risks and problems associated with electronic health records have received far less attention. Three fundamental security goals are essential to EHR systems: confidentiality, integrity and availability (Haas e26). Patients lose the protection of implied trust domain of medical institutions due to their medical record maintenance performed by non-medical enterprises (e27). Depending on the paradigm, enabling access to an increased number of users poses threats to security and privacy.
Although the recent advancements in technology and electronic medical record documentation are associated with improved quality of patient care, the potential for compromised security is at an all time high. As and methods of retrieval and means of access to medical records increases, emphasis must be placed on the importance of patient privacy and user accountability.
Security breaches of EMRs vary from someone without consent viewing the patient’s information, to a hacker using the information to steal one’s identity. According to Privacy Rights Clearing House, more than 260 million data breaches have occurred in the United States, including those of health related records. Approximately 12 percent of data breaches involve medical organizations (Gellman, 2012). According to Redspin, a provider of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act risk analysis and IT security assessment services, more than 6 million individual’s health records were compromised during a period from August 2009 and December 2010 (Author Unknown, 2010). A provision of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act requires all breaches affecting 500 or more people to be reported to the Department of Health and Human Services. This reporting is to be accomplished within 60 days of discovery. The Redspin report covering the period above involved 225 breaches of protected health information. The amount of people with access to an individual’s health record creates concern with confidentiality. According to the Los Angeles
Adding and adopting EHR raises major concerns and challenges for protecting the privacy of patients’ health information. iTrust maintains not only the personal sensitive information and health records, but also a comprehensive transaction logs which is used to track the patient’s profile. The application’s transaction log allows patients to track who viewed their medical information when they log in the iTrust system. The application also has a function that allows patients to change and update their personal information. In addition, iTrust system is designed to equip health care providers with the features to learn about their patients’ chronic diagnosis ranging from diabetes and heart disease if present.
The department of Health and Human Services protects and guides the health and well being of individuals here in America (Thacker, 2014). They fulfill these duties providing Americans with adequate and efficient health and human services and monitoring services designed to increase the efficiency of care in the health system (Thacker, 2014). One of the services being monitored by the department of Health and Human Services is the electronic health record system, which carries private and vital information of patient’s health record enabling all eligible participating health workers access to these records (Thacker, 2014). A breach of the protective health information of patients in a health organization creates chaos as these are against the health insurance portability and accountability (HIPAA) law (Thacker, 2014). Hence, measure will have to be put in place to determine what caused the breach and how to rectify it to ensure the breach never happens again (Thacker, 2014).
The rapid changes in technology over the past few decades has left the healthcare industry ill-prepared to operate in today’s environment. Most substantial protections of sensitive consumer information has come as a result of federal regulation, most notably in 1996 with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Protection of information in the healthcare industry has lagged behind all other industries, perhaps because the records aren’t financial in nature or sensitive government information. Implementing simple steps for many organizations may be enough to limit the vast majority of breaches, although a layered, comprehensive security approach should be the ultimate goal for companies.
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
Privacy of health information has become an area of emphasis across the healthcare industry. It is important to understand what data is protected under federal regulations, how it can be shared, and how to prevent any accidental exposure of protected data. It is possible that data that should be protected can be exposed without anyone even realizing a violation has occurred. Exposure of protected healthcare data can result in medical identity theft and is therefore a very important and hot topic. The security and privacy of healthcare data is necessary to ensure consumer confidence in the healthcare industry and to prevent medical identity theft.