Violation of HIPAA – Confidentiality
[Name of Student]
[Subject Title]
[Date]
Violation of HIPAA – Confidentiality
Legal Obligation 1
Life Consequence
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) of 1996 is United States legislation that covers regulations of fraudulent activities that are enforced under codes of civil and criminal conduct. Under HIPAA, “information is identifiable if it identifies the individual or there is ‘reasonable basis to believe that the information can be used to identify the individual.(McGraw, 2013, p. 1).”
At present, several health care organizations attempt to administer risks on a immediate basis, with each division or business area striving to determine issues in its own method. However, in actual risk presents an overarching challenge that health care organization is best prepared to face by obtaining a all-inclusive, practical approach. Taking a more extensive perspective on risk management defers numerous, critical competencies. Particularly, using a central occurrence management system – one that manifold departments can apply to accumulate information and collaborate help advance communication and insight, decrease and include risk, cut costs and append process steadiness. In the wake of the global cost-effective crisis, risk in the health care industry is varying at an accelerated rate. Such that, the most significant financial and reputation risks in the health care industry include compliance with government mandate to regulatory environment.
Real Life Case
In the story of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” written by Rebecca Skloot highlights how Henrietta Lacks death becomes insignificant after her cells become viral and used up biotechnology (known as HeLa), benefiting practically anyone in need of: polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization. Lacks’ contribution to medicine is highly important yet certain consideration to inform or acquire the consent of Lacks’ family was absent.
The consent for exercising/using tissue of Lacks for diagnosis and research is generally in different approach and understanding of informed consents. However, in the case of Lacks, informing the family of patient that certain cells were taken to her body after death is standard. Such informed consent involves well distinct rules governing collection, retention, and use of the tissue (Cheung, Martin, & Asa 2013). Hence, the power to permit research and the continued scientific advances to Henrietta Lacks’ body should have cooperation and collaboration with her family, particularly when it involved future benefits sharing and/or commercial interests.
The tissue ownership is like owning our own body – it belongs to us. That means the power belongs to the owner of the body. Privilege is not absolute; it is just given by the governing authority holding the power to execute permission. Simply put, privilege is rendered by the owner of the body. For example, in an operation involving life and death, when a person waives his right that upon last breath, any part of his body that can be donated is allowed. The authority to take the organ of the patient is merely privilege. However, in case a patient died, the physicians and other practitioners should not assume that the patient will consent when certain part of his body will be donated or excise for medicinal benefits. The consent lies with the family of the patient whether or not they would allow the excision of any parts of the body of their patients for social utility or for continued research of medicinal advances.
Legal Obligation 2
According to Yovits, privacy is essentially an ethical issue (1994, p.158).” This issue was never new since the patient-physician relationship was then established. Security is paramount in several functions particularly when there is an application of network to ascertain that users’ access on web account would not be sensitive on hackers and misused sensitive data or block account’s opening. The fact that the information necessarily be protected is related with patients, privacy use of patients is highly considered. The strong legal and ethical forces provide that security must essentially be automated particularly with the medical records. That is, reporting communicable diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, are necessarily secured so as to protect the patients. In this regard, technological innovation has helped to override the society’s intrusion to the medical procedures of the persons having illnesses.
There are no other ways of securing the medical databases of the patients and preventing its exposure to vulnerability of exploiting and hacking computers except using a management information technology. It is important that patients’ records are not to put in public access but only for personal view through secured network where only authorized persons with personal encryption could use. However, the public networks are free and accessible to all. This means people can better reach the information and data about latest state public service announcements, patients’ population, and other general information that people may be interested to know. The legal and ethical concerns of technological integration patient care include policy goals to ensure that the record of patients with any kind of conditions are safe from public view and scrutiny.
Contemporary traditional care delivers inadequate services for the patients, dispensing their needs unmet to a great extent. Health care professionals strive to constantly improve in effectiveness and safety toward ultra-productive and homogeneous protocols [Miller & Sim, 2004]. There is no doubt that advances in technology over the past decades have pilot to extensive changes in patients’ health care services. The strategic benefits of technology in supporting these functions are building blocks for competitive advantage and sustainable development of dynamic harmony among actors on reaching optimum level of patient care assistance. However, as technology emphasizes intensive strategic implications through continued innovations, the question of its impacts – beneficial or harmful, in succeeding years is ad infinitum revealing.
The integration of Information Technology infrastructures in health care services, as they stress for continuous advancement of various method to deal with the demand of time, “have provide an indispensable avenue for the rapid and easy dissemination of information to patients and clinicians which allows for interactive communication between the patients and their health care provider teams” [Jackson et al. 2006, p.105]. Fueled by several factors in increasing emphasis on ensuring patients’ safety and averting medical error, computer applications appear quite vulnerable to significant barriers including cost, system interoperability, and lack of well-trained clinician informatics work-force to lead the process result to failures. But as health Information Infrastructure and institutes of health locate these impediments the more IT developers and health workers are empowered to solidify the upgrade the use of technological innovation and emphasize how innovation leads to changes in the way patients are cared. The continuous upgrade of information and communication technology infrastructures helps advance, accelerate, and overcome the limitations in health care services.
Integration of quality and specialized care is emerging as a central challenge in health care delivery, particularly for patients with multiple, complex chronic conditions. In this case highlights the lack communication and strategy management in administering staffs becomes a problem to an organization, in particular the hospital. However, this weakness could be turned off if an organization restructures its processes and systems. Though a popular doctor may hinder the business of a hospital, the board should not be upset in improving its operations.
As technology is becoming the interest of many people in the contemporary, most of the medical practitioners find it effectual to integrate interactive technology to health care system, particularly in dealing with health promotion, monitoring and patient education. Given that the hospital is located in a remote place, in this paper suggests that physicians and the board in order to provide optimal service to their patients should: (a) provide comprehensive framework and real-time approach of interactive technology to patient health care, (b) offer the overview of the driving forces and implementation of technologies on innovating and managing services for further resolution of health care issues to enable the structures and systems of health care processes in optimizing efficiency of technological system, and (c) present real-time feedback through inpatient surveys to assess the transformational perspectives of technological structures, the indicators of quality from the traditional sickness care to modern patient care paradigm.
Electronic medical record (EMR) is “a system that contains a patient’s personal medical history, test results, dictations, and other medical and financial information, of which seeks to improve healthcare by enhancing patient care, preventative health, and provider convenience and is an extreme improvement to an already highly technological healthcare corporation” [Brooks & Grotz, 2010, p. 73]. It highlights how IT-led system changed the significant and various interconnecting point of health care services rendered by clinicians that may be concluded to reliable tracking of entry reports and decision-support of patients records as well as the operation.
References
Brooks, R., & Grotz, C. [2010]. Implementation Of Electronic Medical Records: How Healthcare Providers Are Managing The Challenges Of Going Digital. Journal of Business & Economics Research, 8 [6], 73-84.
Cheung, C.C., Martin, B.R., & Asa, S.L. (2013). Defining diagnostic tissue in the era of personalized medicine. CMAJ 185 (2), 135-139.
Jackson, CJ Bolen, S Brancati, FL Batts-Turner, ML & Gary, TL 2006, A Systematic Review of Interactive Computer-assisted Technology in Diabetes Care, Journal of General Internal Medicine Vol. 21, No. 2, pp.105–110.
McGraw, D. (2013). Building public trust in uses of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act de-identified data. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 20(1), 29-34.
Yovits, M.C. (1994). Advances in computers, Volume 38. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Miller, R.H., & Sim, I. [2004]. Physicians’ Use Of Electronic Medical Records: Barriers And Solutions. Health Affairs, 23 [2], 116-26.
2017/5047
