2-1 Discussion
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School
Southern New Hampshire University *
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Course
250
Subject
Information Systems
Date
Feb 20, 2024
Type
docx
Pages
2
Uploaded by ConstableWillpowerSardine44
Right before I sat down to write my discussion post for this week I took a moment to open my mail and the first item in my mail was a letter from a provider of health management services to healthcare organizations informing me that my data was accessed in a cyber-attack and offering me a year of credit monitoring for free.
Since I received this letter and I have been in the medical field for so many years I thought I would share my thoughts on what HIPAA has meant to the medical community. The Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is regulated by Health and Human Services and ensures data security and confidentiality of patient data along with setting up standardized healthcare transactions and maintaining insurance coverage and patient rights. The general benefits of enforcing data regulations are building trust between healthcare provider and patient. The patient can feel comfortable that the information they share with the provider will stay with the provider and never be shared unless consent by the patient is given. The benefit to HIPAA allows the patient at any time to access their own records and request corrections if errors were made and see who else has accessed their information. It also protects the patient from losing insurance if they are moving from one job to another. Another key benefit
to HIPAA is the requirement that all medical records must be protected through heightened levels
of security and encryption and if a breach were to happen patients are promptly informed of the breach.
With any type of regulation there are drawbacks, and it is no different with HIPAA. The main drawback to HIPAA is the costs involved in maintaining the systems can impede what the hospitals can do in research and development since so much money is going into protecting data and not into trying to find ways to help patients. The other aspect that I also found frustrating with HIPAA is that it not only covers the computers, but it also covers anything that you say
about a patient and often times you can not talk to a colleague about a patient because others are near by who could overhear your conversation and delays in vital communication would happen.
HIPAA also causes issues with facilities that are doing research who really need the patient data to complete studies but cannot access the data without patient consent.
If the regulations were removed, the hospital systems would slowly decrease funding to the security of data in favor of areas that made money for the hospital and would decrease the trust patients have in the medical systems and open the hospitals up to cyber-attacks.
Lopez, D. (2023, Aug 28). Pros and Cons of HIPAA.
NetSec.News. https://www.netsec.news/pros-and-cons-of-hipaa/
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