Question

 

HCI112

Dr. Buthainah is a family physician who refuses the use of EHR in her clinic because she believes that her patients' health information is not secure in the EHR. As a health informatics specialist, write a 150-200 words letter explaining to her actions that have been taken by governments and professional bodies to safeguard EHR data.

 

Answer 1

Respected Dr. Buthainah,

Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a digital version of saving medical records of a patient by the corresponding doctor for future verifications. EHR helps in reviewing the past history, treatments that were followed and other medical problems of a patient, that makes easy for the doctor to proceed with providing medicines to treat the patient in near future. This electronic version of saving health records helps a doctor to retrieve information quickly than written ones.

Though it is digital, security measures should be implemented to maintain privacy. Safety measures ensures that data from EHR is not hacked or stole by undesirable people.Two important medical organization such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health act (HITECH) introduced many safeguard measures to ensure high safety of EHR. There are three main ways that are followed by security professional to maintain safety such as technical, physical and administrative safeguards. All these three are three different themes.

1. Physical safeguards: It involves steps like physical controls, installment of workstation security, identification of radio frequency device (RFID) and assigned personnels etc,.

2. Technical safeguards: In this type, main steps like virus checking, installment of firewall, entity authentication and data encryption are followed.

3. Administrative safeguards: In this theme, measurements like appointment of chief information security officer, contingency, disaster recovery planning and risk analysis are followed.

Other than the above measures, risk assessment and antivirus softwares are the other options that can be followed to provide additional safety. Finger print assessment of the specific physician can be followed because, through cloud computing maximum number of medical histories of many patients can brought under one assess control. Similarly, radio frequency identification device (RFID) can be used as a tag so that other people do not get access towards mismatching RFID tages. Among every safeguards introduced by government, antivirus software, where the safety is provided constantly and RFID are considered the best safeguards to avoid insecurity. In conclusion, EHR is the best way to store and save health records, which is ensured by government and many health care organizations as well so that it is updated timely to improve safety of health records.