Patients’ Protected Health Information (PHI), Essay Example

Evidence-Based Strategies that the Nurse and Interdisciplinary Team can use to Manage Patients’ Protected Health Information (PHI) effectively

The entire medical profession recognizes the importance of ensuring information security and safeguarding patients’ privacy. As such, this has been the main focus of adopting electronic health records in the healthcare sector. According to Samadbeik et al. (2015), the documentation by nurses forms the most important part of data safety in healthcare. Health records are crucial since they are the tools that inform medical decisions. In addition, such records are also used in quality evaluation of care provided, research, coordination of services, accreditation, education, legal protection, and legal processes. Therefore, it serves as the business record in the healthcare sector. In the past, medical records were stored in paper form and used for the same purposes as highlighted above. Nonetheless, the storage of health records has been digitized due to the emergence of modern technology. Therefore, digital health information (DHI) contains vital patient information that nurses should protect alongside other medical professionals.

Since the adoption of technology in storing patients’ personal information, it is today easier for nurses and others to protect such information. Nonetheless, technology is liable to constant changes, which comes with new vulnerabilities never present before (Harman et al., 2012). Therefore, nurses are not supposed to implement security measures and forget about them to secure information. In other words, one of the most effective ways to secure protected information is to conduct constant reviews of the system. Policies and procedures need to be upgraded, and the security systems need to be upgraded whenever there is a need. The bottom line is that a single security solution cannot be used to protect patients’ data. One of the most effective approaches to be used by nurses is to adopt the layered defense system. The idea means adopting a range of defensive measures used to slow down attacks and make data difficult to access.

Nurses and other professionals can use a variety of tactics, such as setting up a firewall to keep unwanted people out of the information. In other words, measures ought to make the network and data inaccessible to outsiders. Kruse et al. (2017) mention that nurses also need anti-fishing and security awareness training to better monitor the network for any malicious activities. Security risk assessment is an important undertaking when thinking about securing personal information. Besides the HIPAA security rule requirement, internal mechanisms should be used to regularly perform security risk assessments (Kruse et al., 2017). Most importantly, data should be encrypted, and this requires an interdisciplinary approach to bring nurses, doctors, and the IT team, among others, together to ensure that data is protected. Remote access is where hackers like to access personal information for malicious purposes. Therefore, remote access should be provided in a secure environment.

To conclude, it is obvious that DHI requires protection from damage and theft from outsiders since it is important to provide services in the healthcare setting. The adoption of new technology has permitted nurses to adopt better ways of storing data. However, technology is subject to numerous changes that require an upgrade. One of the most effective ways to ensure the security of personal information is through regular assessment and updating the network system. Policies and procedures also need to be reviewed to ensure that only authorized people get access to personal data.

References

Harman, L. B., Flite, C. A., & Bond, K. (2012). Electronic health records: privacy, confidentiality, and security. AMA journal of ethics, 14(9), 712-719.

Kruse, C. S., Smith, B., Vanderlinden, H., & Nealand, A. (2017). Security techniques for electronic health records. Journal of medical systems, 41(8), 1-9.

Samadbeik, M., Gorzin, Z., Khoshkam, M., & Roudbari, M. (2015). Managing the security of nursing data in the electronic health record. Acta Informatica Medica, 23(1), 39.