Question

Case Study #14: Breaching the Security of an Internet Patient Portal, Major Themes: Security Prepare a 2-3 page written response to the questions following the case study. Please include a cover page with pertinent course, assignment and student information.

Answer 1

Internet patient portal are health related online application which helps the patients to interact with the health care provider like physicians and hospital. These services are available in internet all the hours of day and night. The central feature that makes any system a patient portal is ability to expose individual patient health information in a secure manner through the internet. It helps to streamline the clinic and hospital visit by enabling patients to fill online applications, make appointments, refill prescriptions,access medical record and pay bills.

In adoption of internet patient portal, security has been the top concern of the health care industry. The information stored in these application are protected health information that is highly confidential. Patient access is secured by use of username and password. Data security is the responsibility information system team. The data must be accurate, prevent the access of unauthorized users and correct the data if damaged. This includes protecting the system by firewall, gouging phishing and protecting data from a hardware or software loss. The breach in the security often results due to architecture of the information system, motivation of individual staff members, and differences among the subcultures of individual groups.

Security training is necessary but not sufficient to prevent information security breaches because individual error, group failures and system accidents may contribute to information security breaches without violating the security rules, standard information security policies, procedures and practices. The breach of the health care information may signify broader organizational discontinuties and failures to which health care administrators should attend mainly during the periods of reform and transition of the IT sector.

ISO, HIPAA and other regulatory regimes are forcing the health care organization to pay a good attention towards maintaing the security of the health information system. Various acts and imprisonments are formulated to check the breach in the patient portal.Therefore the health care organizations should make integrated efforts to prevent breach in the security of internet patient portal.

References:

1. Wikipedia contributers" Patient portal" 22 May 2018.
2. Collman J. ,Cooper T (2007), "Breaching the security of the Kaiser Permanente Internet patient portal:The Organizational Foundations of Information Security" Jounal Of American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), 14(2), 239-243,doi 10.1197/jamia M2195.