Essay On Healthcare Data Breaches

With the enthusiasm for health information technology, potential risks and problems associated with electronic health records have received far less attention. Three fundamental security goals are essential to EHR systems: confidentiality, integrity and availability (Haas e26). Patients lose the protection of implied trust domain of medical institutions due to their medical record maintenance performed by non-medical enterprises (e27). Depending on the paradigm, enabling access to an increased number of users poses threats to security and privacy.

The breach of patients’ confidential information does not only jeopardize our reputation and reduce the public trust in our organization, it could also lead to severe financial consequences. Under HIPAA law, if an organization is found guilty of unauthorized disclosure of patient medical record, they could face prison time harsh privacy violation penalty. We are sure that none of us want this to happen to our organization. So how can we prevent medical record security leak and better protect our patients’ privacy while also providing the best care possible to all our patients? The following guidelines and

Hospitals have put in place widespread security and privacy measures to protect patient health information. However, there are still errors being made in data security through the IT standpoint. Some of these errors or issues include:

Securing larger volumes of data than before, health care providers must be able to adapt to new methods of data storage and access of patient records. Security breaches in health care organizations is lost or stolen from unencrypted devices and media where the provider is using to retrieve records. As more health providers continue to use mobile devices to access pertinent information from electronic medical records systems the chances for breach increases so dramatically. (Rogers,

Privacy of health information has become an area of emphasis across the healthcare industry. It is important to understand what data is protected under federal regulations, how it can be shared, and how to prevent any accidental exposure of protected data. It is possible that data that should be protected can be exposed without anyone even realizing a violation has occurred. Exposure of protected healthcare data can result in medical identity theft and is therefore a very important and hot topic. The security and privacy of healthcare data is necessary to ensure consumer confidence in the healthcare industry and to prevent medical identity theft.

Health care systems must deal with a recurrent battle to improve regulation in order to safeguard the patient health information. However, data breaches continue in the everyday common industry and it is the duty of the health care advisors to make data security the highest importance. According to the NIST standard, the key purposes of risk assessments are to identify "relevant threats" to the organization, including "vulnerabilities, both internal and external," and the "likelihood that harm will occur, (Kaner, 2015).”

The advancement of modern technology and the fast pace progress of Electronic Health Records (EHR); is allowing medical information to become more susceptible to fraud. Therefore the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, was enforced in order to help with the following: simplify administration of health insurance, improve long-term health care, promote medical savings accounts, and combat waste, fraud, abuse within the health insurance and health care delivery. HIPAA policies hold standards that regulate and enforces privacy and securities act as a way to help ensure that protected health information (PHI) confidential. The purpose of the following information is to inform about how data security

With the advent of Electronic health systems, Healthcare organizations are facing challenges in securing patient data. According to us department of health & human services The number of breaches has been raised from 2.7 million in 2012 to 94 million in first half of 2015.Recent breach has resulted in 78.8 million records being exposed. The black-market value of health records have much more significance than credit card data. Exposed data brings up to $50,it is 10times as much as stolen credit card number. Health record has lot more information such as date of birth, maiden names, billing information, diagnostic codes and lot more sensitive information, where it can be used for obtaining controlled substances, fraud insurance and wide activities.

Healthcare information technology is a growing and promising, tool with the goal of improving quality, safety, and efficiency of the delivery of healthcare. But with this technology comes possible risk of security breaches. It is imperative to run risk analysis and apply technical safeguards to protect confidential healthcare information. The Office of Civil Rights along with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule protect the public’s rights of nondiscrimination and health information privacy (Sayles, 2013). In addition, the Patient Safety Act and Rule establish a voluntary reporting system to enhance the data available to assess and resolve patient safety and health care quality issues (Sayles, 2013). In the following cases breaches of confidentiality were reported, a violation of the law, and enforcement was set in place. Herein, the cases will be summarized and the principal threats will be highlighted. A sample security plan with for a medium sized organization will be included along with a critique of the plan.

With the adoption of health information technology like electronic health records, it has failed to meet the expectation of making it cost efficient and safer. But even with the high expectations of quality and patient security there has been numerous reasons found to why there are safety hazards which are sometimes referred to as “e-iatrogenesis”. (Bowman,2013) Electronic health records issue evolved due to data being lost and entered incorrectly which has led the loss of information integrity. Therefore, hackers go for the health care industry. Being that health care organization hold onto to “personally indefinable information, such as credit card details, names and email addresses” (Budd, 2016) makes it an easy target because most healthcare facilities don’t invest in money on

The field of healthcare today is continuing to advance. The use of new emerging technologies is largely responsible for that. Healthcare professionals are able to communicate with one another and share pertinent patient information with one another faster, and easier than ever before. With the signing of legislation like the HITECH Act and the Affordable Care Act, healthcare organizations are beginning to transform the way patient information is used and stored. As healthcare pushes further toward more advanced technology the care that patients receive becomes more personalized and optimized allowing for shorter hospital stays and better care overall. But, as these new technologies are being implemented, risks to the security of patient

In today’s society, medical records becomes a huge issue. In many organizations such as healthcare, patient confidentiality becomes a high concern. Having internet health services, creates a challenge for compliance in healthcare. Providers have treated application security and infrastructure security independently until now. Access must be secured for clinical applications to alleviate the concern from providers in healthcare. Therefore, IT infrastructure must be protected from hackers, misusing information as well as thieves. (FairWarning, n.d.)

Patient’s privacy and Information security has important role in Healthcare organizations. Health information is private and it should be protected by the Federal Law HIPAA. In recent years, Healthcare providers moving the patients’ health records on computers from paper. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) with patient’s information is considered as very sensitive in Healthcare organization. The sensitive information of patients in healthcare has to be managed such that it is safe and secure from unauthorized access. In this paper I have discussed the concepts of information security and patients’ privacy, the HIPAA security standards, security threats and privacy issues in healthcare.

Information security and privacy is occupying a most important role in the healthcare territory in order to deliver protected information process to their patients (Appari, & Johnson, 2010). As healthcare department is the organization with vast data and essential information the hospitals has to keep a useful information security technique in their enterprise process (Mishra et al., 2011). Information security is one such phase in the healthcare sphere which is extremely problematic to describe and evaluate even to the individuals who are working on the process. In the healthcare organization, information is of many types which required for the work and even the security is a main control for almost all the practices which are transmitted out in the healthcare field (Appari, & Johnson, 2010). Hospitals, in specific, have been instructed to create a new set of security specialists to protect healthcare data tools techniques upon which exists may rely. Healthcare data is very critical for patients because it is very confidential records. If a medical apparatus is filled with a computer virus it can even exemplify a possibility to patients ' lives. Hence, hospitals should design alertness of the risk, to defend against concerns to healthcare databanks and be concerned about the high risk of infected computers or medical tools being connected to their networks (Mishra et al., 2011).

The rapid changes in technology over the past few decades has left the healthcare industry ill-prepared to operate in today’s environment. Most substantial protections of sensitive consumer information has come as a result of federal regulation, most notably in 1996 with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Protection of information in the healthcare industry has lagged behind all other industries, perhaps because the records aren’t financial in nature or sensitive government information. Implementing simple steps for many organizations may be enough to limit the vast majority of breaches, although a layered, comprehensive security approach should be the ultimate goal for companies.