Question

4. Data Privacy and Security

Things to know:

What legal requirements apply to protected health information?

What methods and technologies are used to protect data?

Find one example from the news where the privacy and security of protected health information was violated. Be ready to discuss this incident in your answer.

Answer 1

1 HIPAA Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act describes how personal health information may be used and how the client can obtain acess to the information and is based on the sound current practice that protected health information should not be used or disclosed when it is not necesssary to satisfy a purpose or carry out a function.Protected health information includes individually identifiable information that relates to the clients past,present or future health ,treatment and payment for health care services.It requires the agencies to keep PHI private ,provides information to the client about the legal responsibilities regarding privacy and explains the clients right with respect to PHI.

2 Protecting health care information from being abused is a daunting task.But we have various technologies to secure data and it includes Authentication,encryption ,data masking and access control.Some of the methods used in health care to save the data are de-identification,HybrEx and identity based anonymization.

3.Health care breaches are now became quite common.The attackers focus on the health care sector because they knew that all the personal identity details can be accessed for performing identity thefts.Healthcare sectors are always a lucrative target for the hackers An example would on October 3 the Detroit health system first discovered that a cyber criminal has stolen the email credentials of a group of employees.This unfortunate incident exposed the data of 18000 patients of Henry Ford Health.