Question

What are the negative impacts of business intelligence in Healthcare? What is one commonly used software tool related to Healthcare? Briefly address the issue of information security for HealthCare?

Answer 1

The term Business Intelligence means the technologies, applications and practices which are used for the collecting information, integrating, analysing and presenting information in such a manner to support better decision making.

In Healthcare sector, Business intelligence software is one of the best tools to improve key performance indicators of this sector like patient satisfaction, patient safety, and patient waiting time etc. BI tools allows to create reports using available information from patient questionnaires and surveys, electronic health records and other sources and helps in improving patient outcomes and experience, increase profits etc. but business intelligence has negative impacts as well on healthcare which can be explained as:

a) Privacy of patient might be on risk as personal details and history of patient can be accessed online from other sources as well by hackers and privacy and confidentiality of patient records will get in risk. Information sharing with hospitals or doctors becomes necessary to know about patient disease, ongoing treatment and past history and by this sharing, privacy will get into danger sometime.

b) As data is to be entered manually by person or staff, then there is possibility of getting wrong results or data as no software can detect such kind of errors or frauds at input level.

c) As input is to be entered manuallly and output is being processed on the basis of inputs entered , so staff needs to be more careful as such intelligence software needs due consideration and attention in maintaining and improving output results. Business Intelligence can't rectify such errors itself.

d) Decision making process also get affected by such software as decisions are to be taken on the basis of result obtained and results are based on a large pool of accurate data of patients and their details. Inaccuarte or incomplete data will result in Inaccuarte or inappropriate decisions.

The most commonly used software tool related to Healthcare is Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system of Electronic Health Record (EHR) Software. This software maintains records of patient data, their personal information, medical charts, and medications in digital format, which is stored and can be accessed by authorized users within a secure digital platform. The aim of this software is to provide an efficient and secure system by which patient care becomes integrated across different health care departments.

Other Healthcare softwares are also available like Medical Diagnosis Software, Medical Database Software, Appointment Scheduling, Hospital Management Software, Medical Billing, Medical Research etc.

There are many kinds of threats to information security that is faced by HealthCare which can be explaine as under:

• Organisational Threats:

These thretas can be seen in ways like an employee who accesses data without any legitimate need or an outside attacker (hacker) hacks organization‘s information infrastructure to steal data illegaly or with wrong intention. Other cases be like:

a) Healthcare personnel or staff unintentionally disclose patient information to others mistakenly like email sent to wrong address or an information leak through peer-to-peer file sharing.

b) An insider who has data access privilege tries to leak a patient‘s records for their own purpose, e.g. medical personnel accessing heath information about a celebrity and transmitting to media etc.

c) Insiders is tranferring patient information to outsiders for profit or taking any revenge on patient.

• Sytematic Threats can also be faced by Healthcare sector like system failure can destroy of whole information and result to huge data loss which is very difficult to recover or impossible in some cases. Sometimes, Patients or organizations may incur financial losses as a result of malpractices including upcoding of diagnoses, and rendering of medically unnecessary services, prescribing unnecessary medications and diagnosis.

• Internet worms or viruses, any file deletion or corrupted data, and the lack of contingency plans backup and similar activities can also be considered as possible issues for information security.