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Why Is It Important To Convert Protected Health Information?

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Under this rule, individuals are informed if ever there is a case of a loss, theft or unauthorized disclosures of their unsecured protected health information. Patients must be informed about the breach within not more than 60days. If ever the breach of health information affects more than 500 people, the media must be informed about it. However, the breach notification rule applies only to unencrypted health information. Therefore, HIPAA encourages all covered entities to apply the use of proper encryption technique which shall convert protected health information (PHI) to an unreadable, unusable and meaningless format to malicious users.
2.10 Electronic Health Records Standards
According to a paper on Electronic Health Records Standards (Kalra, 2006),to receive an integrated and complete view of the health history of each patient has so far proved to be challenging to meet. This requirement has been recognized to be a major hurdle to the safe and effective delivery of healthcare services by doctors and by governments internationally. The paper highlights that …show more content…

There was no standard way of keeping patient data on healthcare applications. There was no communication between software companies on how interfaces in healthcare applications were to be built hence software applications were not compatible with each other. It is important that healthcare organizations follow the same standards when setting up their healthcare information system, thus creating interoperability so that the sharing and exchange of information within and across healthcare providers is facilitated. As a result, a volunteer group introduced the Health Level Seven Standard (HL7) for healthcare organizations to follow the same standards when developing their healthcare information system so that data can be shared seamlessly. In a nutshell, HL7 was introduced for the following

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