Essay Example on Maintaining HIPAA Compliance and PGI Security

Introduction

HIPAA has certain rules and guideline to facilitate privacy and security of information in all healthcare centers, especially regarding protecting patient privacy. The HIM team in a healthcare institution have the responsibility of controlling and monitoring the flow of information in a hospital, hence accountable for the implementation of the HIPAA privacy and security rules as well (Taitsman et al, 2013). Therefore, effective and efficient compliance of such rules can help protect patient information.

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Implement Hospital Standards and Laws

Personalized policies and rules and regulations can be used to govern hospitals' or employees' conduct when handling patient information. Healthcare organizations should implement specific policies that protect patient information from being shared or revealed in a compromising manner, thus, patient data protection (Hall & McGraw, 2014).

Technological Security

Acquiring and implementing a culture of high-level security levels and protection choices helps improve patient information security. For instance, to restrict unauthorized personnel entry, the use of data encryption, password protection, and clearance levels can help protect patient information (Kruse et al. 2017).

Accountability

This means accepting the error made and the punishment that accompanies it. There should be dire consequences for hospitals or employee who have facilitated or participated in the patient data breach. This may mean punishment like stripping them of their license, giving leave without pay, demotion, etc.

Measure Difficult to Implement

The accountability measure involves reducing or firing doctors or employees who may be very skilled and valuable to the institution. therefore, most time these perpetrators are given second and third chances which make the policy seem useless and difficult.

The technological security measure purposes at protecting the institution from outside threats. However, there are many ways to breach such a surety system e.g., hacking, blackmail or throwing unwanted but useful materials. Since the healthcare organization is incapable of controlling the external threats, then they will always remain a threat and difficult to prevent.

Implementation Strategy

Strict but simple punishments can be put as a limitation to exploit the weakness of the accountability measure. This means giving simple but effective punishments to perpetrators of a patient data breach, e.g. unpaid leave or suspensions up to a particular unchanged limit.

To succeed in external security threats a hospital can use effective and very skilled IT personnel to protect it from cybersecurity breaches and hacking.

References

Hall, J. L., & McGraw, D. (2014). For telehealth to succeed, privacy and security risks must be identified and addressed. Health Affairs, 33(2), 216-221. Retrieved from https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2013.0997

Kruse, C. S., Smith, B., Vanderlinden, H., & Nealand, A. (2017). Security techniques for the electronic health records. Journal of medical systems, 41(8), 127. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10916-017-0778-4

Taitsman, J. K., Grimm, C. M., & Agrawal, S. (2013). Protecting patient privacy and data security. New England Journal of Medicine, 368(11), 977-979. Retrieved from https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmp1215258