Question

You are the HIM Director in an acute care hospital setting. Your facility has purchased an electronic health record (EHR) system and pressure is mounting to deploy this system as soon as possible by the chief information officer (CIO) and chief of the medical staff (CMS). However, during a testing period, you and your staff discover that the EHR system does not comply with applicable federal privacy and security standards. It is your recommendation to stop the deployment until these issues can be resolved; however, the CIO and CMS disagree.

Outline your response as the HIM director’s perspective to each of the nine steps as if you were writing the memorandum to the CIO and CMS ( fill in info for each step)

1. Clearly define the issue.

2. Determine the facts of the situation.

3. Determine who the stakeholders are, the values at stake, and the obligations and interests of each stakeholder.

4. Determine what options are available and evaluate them.

5. Decide what should be done.

6. Justify the decision made by identifying reasons that support the decision.

7. Implement the decision.

8. Evaluate the outcome of the decision.

9. Examine how to prevent the issue from recurring

Answer 1

1.Clearly define the issue- the EHR system does not comply with federal privacy and security standards .

2. Determine the facts of the situation - on using the new EHR system there is leakage of information regarding patient to other health care sector as a data for their studies and also no secure logins are provided resulting in easy access by anyone.

3. Stakeholders are those private sector people (business people) who require data regarding patient and also patient sample for their research purposes by indirectly providing electronic equipment for the hospital at a cheap price to attract the administration with or without involvement of officers working with in the hospital.

4. Options available - an assessment done by the officer appointed by specialised committee like( retired judge )etc will help to find out the discrepancy raised by HIM regarding the EHR system.

An outer officer will judge the case sincerely as compared to those officers within organisation who are involved in this discrepancy.

5. Until there is a clarification or change in the federal privacy and security standards provided by the EHR system ,these systems should not be used by the health care workers of the organisations in their day to day activities .

6. Justification for the decision - until there is security to the patient information related to health there will be no usage of this system because it's the breech of patients confidentiality . The patient has the right to not to disclose his /her information. It's illegall to use patiens data without patients consent . It's one of the right of patient to share health information.

7. A committee is made to undergo the verification of the above mentioned issues and no use of EHR system by the health care providers until a the issue is sorted out.

8. Outcome - a thorough analysis of the problems and issues regarding EHR system were done by the committee and it concluded that the provided EHR system are not up to the grade and are not secure to be used in health care sector as it cause breech of information and there is no secure login available for the functionality.

9. To prevent the issue from reoccurring - the officer involved in the discrepancy has to be resigned from their positions because they did it for the sake of bribe . To prevent the reoccurrence these officers must be punished as per the law so that no one can think about this again.