Overview Electronic Health Records, Essay Example

Electronic health architecture represents life history of a patient’s medical history. In fact, it is an electronic version of the patient’s medical history and is updated by health care professionals as required. The electronic version also includes, all the primary administrative clinical data, pertinent to that patient’s care under a particular health care professional. In addition, the electronic health record includes demographics, progress notes, issues, vital signs, medications, immunizations, test reports, laboratory data and radiology reports (Overview electronic health records). Moreover, a comprehensive idea related to its architectural requirements is available on ‘www.openehr.org’ stated as “a set of clinical and technical requirements for a record architecture that supports using, sharing, and exchanging electronic health records across different health sectors, different countries, and different models of healthcare delivery”. The definition represents the flow of these health records across the different geographical locations within the computerized network. As the information flows on the network, there is always a probability related to security and data protection of these health records. Moreover, the program named as Advanced Informatics in Medicine (AIM) highlighted severe safety problems. Furthermore, the group was created for addressing the issues on the basis of Six Safety First Principles for medical informatics. Consequently, the findings were remarkable as previously no issues were highlighted with prime concerns (Lacoste, n.d). For instance, the issues involve giving the wrong treatment to the patients, refuse to give the appropriate treatment, delay the treatment due to insufficient information etc.  These issues are of prime concern, as they can result in premature death for any patient or patients (F. Mennerat & Mennerat,).

In order to minimize the cost of common administrative transactions, health plans, made the U.S congress optimistic to create an administrative outline of precise transactions related to electronic health data. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 produced inducements for public and private partnerships to expand and deploy standards in order to standardize data related to health care in electronic administrative transactions related to health and standards for security and privacy of independently exclusive health information. The adaptation of HIPAA standards developed by accredited standards developing organizations clearly hold the guarantee led by US government. The transactions elected by Congress, the process of selecting the principles in the Department of Human Services and Health, the doctrine that steered these selections, and the actual selections, are presented. A prosperous joint venture for administrative health data standards may cover the way for accomplishment of data standards in clinical health and their associated application.

In order to address the security issues, professionalism is required in terms of design and development, and acquisition and maintenance while operating electronic health records. However, health professional shares their own code of ethics which is not effective in terms of Health Information Professionals (HIPS). In order to minimize these issues, the International Medical Informatics Association is in the phase of acclimatizing a suitable code of ethics (F. Mennerat & Mennerat,). Furthermore, the expectations from this code are as follows:

• Privacy of information and character
• Ingenuousness
• Security
• Accessibility
• Justifiable violation
• Slightest invasive Alterative
• Responsibility

Apart from the code of ethics, principle concerns are also related to the transmission of these digital records over the computerized network. Moreover, technical and organized measures are required when the computerized data travels on the network. In order to address the issues on the revolutionary advanced technology, expertise for the implementation cost and risk of dealing with the processed data is required. In terms of healthcare systems, it is not mandatory that the individual employing system will only operate and process the data in the system. The instructions can be passed for a processor who will access the system to process health care records. However, the processor must have adequate assurance of security. Moreover, the instructor must ensure strict compliance with the security requirements while passing instructions to the processor. Furthermore, a written contract is essential for only fulfilling instructions from a responsible instructor or senior healthcare professional. Besides, the key standards includes classification of security and safeguard profiles, passwords, algorithms for digital signatures, communication related to healthcare in a secure environment and health informatics.

References

ISO EHR standards – openEHR :: Future proof and flexible EHR specifications Retrieved 2/20/2011, 2011, from http://www.openehr.org/standards/iso.html

Lacoste, G.SEMPER–secure electronic marketplace for europe Berlin ; Springer, c2000.

Mennerat, & Mennerat, F.Electronic health records and communication for better health care: Proceedings of EuroRec ’01 Amsterdam ; IOS Press ; c2002.

Overview electronic health records Retrieved 2/20/2011, 2011, from https://www.cms.gov/EHealthRecords/