Essay Example on Health Information Security and Safety in Healthcare

Health care information security and safety are essential elements of Health Insurances Portability and Accountability Act Rules (HIPAA). The HIPAA standards ensure that safety and health information security is given priority in the healthcare environment (Kisekka and Giboney 17). Therefore, health information security should be assessed by carrying out a risk assessment and implementing a hazard management program to address any vulnerability in the health sector. It is healthcare institutions' responsibility to protect the patients' personal information admitted in hospital and guarantee them safety. Health data security is important since it guards the information against fraudsters and hackers to use the patients' information to carry out medical fraud and financial benefits. Therefore, the emergence of cybersecurity has helped improve and keep patients confidential and secure for health experts' legal purposes and protect cybercrimes (Merkow and Breithaupt 18). Ethical health safety and privacy protection of patients gives valuable benefits to society. Therefore, safeguarding patients entails protecting them from harm and preserving their rights.

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Quality information technology (IT) is the best approach to be adopted in the healthcare environment to improve healthcare information security and safety. Therefore, to have a health facility with strong healthcare information security and safety posture, it needs quality IT with a stable application base and information technology infrastructure. IT in the healthcare environment has been difficult to achieve quality due to a lack of competent human resources, complex application space, and restraints in the budget (Abdelhak et al., 23). Health information security and safety need the IT infrastructure with configuration management, logging, change management, and monitoring.

Ways of Maintaining Healthcare Information Security and Safety

Due to the alarming rate of breaching patient's data privacy, the adoption of technology in the healthcare sector has become the standard approach to enhancing patient's information security and safety in the medical industry (Merkow and Breithaupt 28). Thus, to protect the patient's information and improve service delivery in the hospital, there has been increased medical software use. Implementing electronic health record software (HER) or electronic medical record (EMR) is not enough to solve the issue of information security and safety; hence health organizations should adopt the following approaches

Control Data Accessibility

Based on the Verizon PHI study on data breach, 58% of healthcare information breaches scenarios entails insiders; the larger percentage are the insider within an organization (Rathee 26). Healthcare data protection should be highly taken care of, and relevant people should only access the patient's information, and some information should only be made available for physicians. Healthcare organizations should train nurses and health experts on the essence of healthcare data security, and the end-users on the security hazards related to healthcare information should be trained. To ensure safety and information security, patients should take the same precautions as nurses to safeguard sensitive data, such as assuring that personal data access is password protected.

Train Workers to Recognize Potential Cyber Attacks

Before the adoption of healthcare information technology, employees should be trained to be used to it. The procedures and policies to guarantee the safety and healthcare data security need to be changed to fit the digitization of patients' records; this will be achieved by training staff and nurses in charge of data protection. In most hospitals, approximately 36% of data breaches that occur are due to nurses' unintentional acts; this can be avoided by properly training employees (Van Deursen et al. 37). Security awareness education will provide healthcare employees with the knowledge and skills to better recognize potential security threats and make efficient decisions to protect patient information from landing in unauthorized hands.

Take Note of the Devices Healthcare Data Passes Through

The internet of things implies that the current world is filled with data analysis and storage devices every day. Therefore, to eradicate the chances of a healthcare information breach, the organization should consider having highly skilled IT staff who assess the hazards of each device used to access patients' data.

Importance of Health information security and Safety

Enhancing health information security and safety in healthcare settings is very important since it will increase patients' demand for the facility and lead to improved service delivery. The following are the most significant points for maintaining health data security and safety.

Maintaining efficiency in the healthcare setting

Efficiency is the key benefit of maintaining health information security and safety for the patient. In case of often health data breach, health organization should switch to paper and pen for data documentation. Protecting patient's information helps keep traffic at its highest potential, enabling physicians to administer quality care and medication to patients daily.

Improving Health Information Security and Safety is Important to Patients

Ensuring that there is an effective health information security and safety in healthcare settings is more important in a patient's perspective than healthcare settings, keeping data secure and private. Patients desire to maintain their health data confidential for their privacy and health perspective; it is crucial for nurse-patient confidentiality agreements.

In conclusion, understanding how to maintain proper health information and safety in a healthcare setting is crucial for effective health organizations' management. Data is becoming more valuable in the current world; hence protecting data is very important for future reference and against hackers who might use the information for financial gains.

Works Cited

Abdelhak, Mervat, Sara Grostick, and Mary Alice Hanken. Health information-e-book: Management of a strategic resource. Elsevier Health Sciences, 2014.Kisekka, Victoria, and Justin Scott Giboney. "The effectiveness of health care information technologies: evaluation of trust, security beliefs, and privacy as determinants of health care outcomes." Journal of medical Internet research 20.4 (2018): e107.

Merkow, Mark S., and Jim Breithaupt. Information security: Principles and practices. Pearson Education, 2014.Rathee, Avisha. "Data Breaches in Healthcare: A Case Study." CYBERNOMICS 2.2 (2020): 25-29.

Van Deursen, Nicole, William J. Buchanan, and Alistair Duff. "Monitoring information security risks within health care." computers & security 37 (2013): 31-45.