Medical care providers have the responsibility to ensure that they meet the standards and stick to the legal regulations that govern the health information of their patients. The solitude regulation overall allows but does not necessarily require insured medical care providers to give patients the option as to whether their data and personal information may be disclosed to others for specific vital purposes. These purposes are the treatment of the patients, payment of the health care services provided, and medical operations. Since the patients are not required to be implemented in the electronic health information exchange, medical care providers have given patients options as to whether their health information and data can be exchanged electronically (Na et al., 2018). Under the HIPAA, health care providers and other stakeholders are required to have the full consent of the patient before disclosing their health information and data to a third party.
It is significant for health care providers and other staff to participate in the contribution of their skills and knowledge on how the information and data of the patients can be protected, secured, and remain confidential. Many challenges arise among the health care team works that interfere with the protection of information of the patients (Liu et al., 2015). Interprofessional coordination and cooperation demands interpersonal communication skills among the health care providers. When there is an excellent interprofessional understanding in the health care facilities, protecting the information and data of the patients will be easy since there is an understanding among themselves and coordination. Once the medical care providers and patients have confronted complicated medical issues, there is the expectation of them working together to attain the primary objective of protecting and securing the patient’s information. Therefore, the interprofessional relationship is a keys factor when handling the health information or data of a patient.
Health care providers and institutions identify and analyze security technologies in terms both of their operational benefits for protecting their patient’s privacy and their cost. There are several specialized techniques that medical care institutions can use to protect the electronic information and data of patients. These techniques include; the authentication of any individuals that want to access the data of the patient. The person must have an access card, a lock key, or a token to access the needed information (Freundlich et al., 2018). Another technique that is being used is the audit trail. This enables the institution to trace all those who accessed the data and knowledge of the patient at a specific date and time. The audit trail has enhanced the depreciation of the violations of the confidentiality of medical care information and data. The application of physical security of communications, computers, and display systems has also contributed to accessing the information and data of a patient. This can only be achieved by establishing and installing security cameras that have recordings of who access the information of a patient at a given time and date.
The use of advanced technology in medical care organizations in protecting and securing patients’ health information has raised many issues. The creation of digital data and its implementation in health care institutions led to many challenges such as breach of data security, privacy, and confidentiality (Na et al., 2018). Therefore, the introduction of HIPAA has intervened and forced medical care providers to observe and respect their patients’ data security, privacy, and privacy. Therefore, healthcare institutions are using different methods to ensure that the violation of the patient’s right does not happen. For example, some health care organizations are using mobile phones and social media platform that requires a passcode to log into the patient personal health information account. These passcodes are well known to only health care providers and patients.
References
Freundlich, R. E., Freundlich, K. L., & Drolet, B. C. (2018). Pagers, smartphones, and HIPAA: finding the best solution for electronic communication of protected health information. Journal of medical systems, 42(1), 1-3.
Liu, V., Musen, M. A., & Chou, T. (2015). Data breaches of protected health information in the United States. Jama, 313(14), 1471-1473.
Na, L., Yang, C., Lo, C. C., Zhao, F., Fukuoka, Y., & Aswani, A. (2018). Feasibility of reidentifying individuals in large national physical activity data sets from which protected health information has been removed with use of machine learning. JAMA network open, 1(8), e186040-e186040.
