Whitland Medical Center Case Study

APS Supervisor Matthew Mitchell made face to face contact with Mr. Charles Hamilton at the Intermediate Care Unit of Walker Baptist Medical Center on 7/17/15 at roughly 10:30 AM. Before visiting with Mr. Hamilton in his room, Mitchell spoke with Ginger Kilgore, RN Case Manager, in her office. She stated that Mr. Hamilton was ready for discharge. She admitted that the hospital was aware Mr. Hamilton’s home in Carbon Hill was currently without electricity and water, but that no alternative placement could be found, nor would Mr. Hamilton agree to discharge anywhere but his residence. Ms. Kilgore also mentioned that Dr. Claude Osula admitted Mr. Hamilton into their care a few days ago due to low potassium levels. He noted in his discharge summary

Rob Pettigrew is the manager of technical systems and help desk center of Wyoming Medical Center in Casper, Wyoming. Protecting networks are getting harder as there are different types of devices being used by companies. An example of this is Wyoming Medical Center has four different classifications of PCs, PCs in the hallways for the staff to use, PCs at the nursing stations, PCs in offices, and PCs on that move between patient rooms. Pettigrew deployed Novell ZenWorks to 850 of the medical centers 900 PCs to ensure each one has the right software. With having multiple applications, medical software systems, and the different machine types, and restrictions make it difficult for Pettigrew to ensure proper protection for the network. Another concern is the

Jones Regional Medical Center is a huge academic health center with 900 beds and are known for its research and teaching hospitals. Additionally, the IT staff at Jones supports 300 applications and 12,000 workstations. The center uses Technology Med (TechMed) for their admitting system. The system includes registration, inpatient charge, payment entry, master patient index, admission, hospital billing, and more. The TechMed system has been accessible since 1998; Jones is beginning to plan a replacement of this systems because of the fragility of the software (Wager, 2013).

CipherPoint software, inc.; CipherPoint announces data security solutions suite for healthcare organizations. (2013). Information Technology Business, , 73. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1428354374?accountid=458

Tulsa Memorial Hospital (TMH) is one of the nine acute care hospitals that serves in the general population area. Historically, it has been highly profitable due to its well-appointed facilities, excellent medical staff, good-standing reputation for quality care and its ability to give individual attention for each of its patients. The hospital, in addition to its inpatient services, operates an emergency department and an urgent care center located two miles from the hospital across the street from a major shopping mall.

As more healthcare information is stored and transmitted digitally, ensuring that your organization complies with the myriad of federal and state regulations is becoming increasingly difficult. As part of this digital transformation, healthcare organizations are partnering with cloud companies, data processors, and other organizations that must also comply with HIPAA business associate requirements. This has resulted in an increase in the scope of security challenges for healthcare providers and their business associates.

Another downfall or disadvantage of using this software is the concerns of client’s security. Most individuals think a disadvantage would be the security vulnerability for the client’s medical records. The ultimate concern is that hackers are still out there and may steal client’s personal information and possible compromise their identity. It does not matter how many password encryptions, security features added, and firewalls are put up, hackers can get in there. However, there are also companies that specialize in security measures for the maintenance of Electronic Health Records software.

Securing larger volumes of data than before, health care providers must be able to adapt to new methods of data storage and access of patient records. Security breaches in health care organizations is lost or stolen from unencrypted devices and media where the provider is using to retrieve records. As more health providers continue to use mobile devices to access pertinent information from electronic medical records systems the chances for breach increases so dramatically. (Rogers,

The ethical committee should intervene to determine the ethical responsibilities of the medical and administrative staff. The people involved should be held accountable and give them the opportunity to communicate the patients about the medical

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

West Florida Regional Medical Center (WFRMC) located on the north side of Pensacola, Florida competed strongly with sacred heart and Baptist hospitals for patients. WFRMC’s CEO John Kausch was an active member of the Total Quality Council of the Pensacola Area Chamber of Commerce (PATQC) (McLaughlin, C.P., Johnson, J.K., & Sollecito, 2012).. PATQC’s vision was to develop the Pensacola, Florida area into a total quality community by promoting productivity, quality and economic developments in all area organizations both public and private (McLaughlin, et, al., 2012). John

In the current era of digitization, with all the data being converted from paper to electronic records, even the healthcare industry has become so dependent on technology. As hospitals are adopting electronic means for data storage, medical results, transactions and billing, utmost care is to be taken to protect a patient’s personal privacy by protecting their electronic health records, which is only possible by enhancing the security and privacy of the hospital’s network. This paper proposes certain security mechanisms for a more controlled and safer access to the healthcare provider’s network, thus being aware of every device trying to access the network and making sure only authorized devices are able to connect, with the help of measures such as, intrusion detection systems to continuously monitor the network, firewalls to ensure endpoint devices comply with security policies and biometrics for identity based network access control.

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).

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.