Protecting Patient Data

Protecting Patient Data
Over the past years, there have been growing concerns relating to the data security breaches as well as theft of medical information.  This aspect has led to the interference of the privacy during the entire service delivery process. In all settings of healthcare provision, the executives have both professional and moral duty of respecting the confidentiality and security of the medical records of various patients (Sarkar & Sana, 2018).

At the same time, there is a need for a flow of information along the line of various care providers who are mandated to access the information. This article dwells on the protection of the patients data in relation to consideration of the case study of United General Hospital.

Policy Manual

The issues of privacy and individuals losing of control over the protected health information in the care centers they visit have turned to be an issue due to the computerization which makes such information vulnerable for access by other unauthorized persons through dubious means (Rachels, 2017)…

The legal requirements for the protection of patient health records concerning the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act revolve around patient privacy and data security. The patient privacy side deals to protect the rights of the care users by pushing the care providers to keep their information and data confidential. Besides, the data security aspect comes with safety whereby those in custody of the patient data are required to control and restrict their access to various persons.

Risk assessment

Risk assessment allows for the determination of the best protection method that fits the organizational records…

The organization also ought to do more frequent vulnerability assessments and testing for a possibility of penetration of their system (Tipton, Forkey & Choi, 2016). Such assessment is likely to detect hackers who have the potential of breaching the information flow within the facility. The assessment can be done monthly or quarterly and compare the results to see any changes and what has remained fixed.

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Policy statements concerning safeguarding patients’ records

United Health needs to abide by the state laws as well as HIPAA through the consideration that all the healthcare providers have a moral and professional duty to respect confidentiality and work towards protecting the security of patients’ medical records…

Alignment with Regulatory Requirements

HIPAA requires the covered entities and business associates that access personal health information and have to ensure there are administrative, physical and technical safety measures that are in line with its privacy policy to protect the integrity of the patients’ health information. In the event of a breach, the facility ought to follow the breach notification rule where the individual ought to be notified and action taken against the perpetrators…

Managerial Oversight

In ensuring that the patient records are kept safe and protected throughput, all the electronic health records must be kept under username and password so that they are only accessible to only authorized information. The personal information of the patients including the sensitive information about social and financial elements of the patient should be only accessed by the team leaders within the hospital department…

Conclusion

Protecting patients’ data is essential in all healthcare institutions for both the patient and the facility of care. The data need to be protected both during its usage and even the time of disposal. Concerning the HIPAA, access to health records need to only fall under authorized individuals, and these must be governed by security rule, privacy rule as well as the legal obligation between business associates whenever they share information…

References

Clark, B. W. (2016). The Effectiveness of a Compliance Strategy to Improve Information Security in the US Healthcare Sector (Doctoral dissertation, Utica College).

Filkins, B. L., Kim, J. Y., Roberts, B., Armstrong, W., Miller, M. A., Hultner, M. L., … & Steinhubl, S. R. (2016). Privacy and security in the era of digital health: what should translational researchers know and do about it?. American journal of translational research8(3), 1560.

Gonzalez, N., Miers, C., Redigolo, F., Simplicio, M., Carvalho, T., Näslund, M., & Pourzandi, M. (2012). A quantitative analysis of current security concerns and solutions for cloud computing. Journal of Cloud Computing: Advances, Systems and Applications1(1), 11.

Mohammed, D., Mariani, R., & Mohammed, S. (2015). Cybersecurity challenges and compliance issues within the US healthcare sector. International Journal of Business and Social Research5(2), 55-66.

Rachels, J. (2017). Why privacy is important. In Privacy (pp. 11-21). Routledge.

Sarkar, B. K., & Sana, S. S. (2018). A conceptual distributed framework for improved and secured healthcare system. International Journal of Healthcare Management, 1-13.

Small, A., & Wainwright, D. (2018). Privacy and security of electronic patient records–Tailoring multimethodology to explore the socio-political problems associated with Role Based Access Control systems. European Journal of Operational Research265(1), 344-360.

Tipton, S. J., Forkey, S., & Choi, Y. B. (2016). Toward Proper Authentication Methods in Electronic Medical Record Access Compliant to HIPAA and CIA Triangle. Journal of medical systems40(4), 100.