Privacy and Confidentiality in the Electronic Medical Record

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It was just yesterday when Electronic health records was just introduced in healthcare industry. People were not ready to accept it due to higher cost and consumption of time associated in training people and adopting new technology. Despite of all this criticism, use of Internet and Electronic Health records are now gaining its popularity among health care professionals, as it is the most effective way to communicate with patient and colleagues. More and more hospitals and clinics are getting rid of paper base filling system and investing in cloud base storage.
According to HIMSS The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a longitudinal electronic record of patient health information generated by one or more encounters in any care delivery setting. It includes information from patient demographics, medications, to the laboratory reports. Introduction of Electronic Medical Records in healthcare organizations was to improve the quality care and to lessen the cost by standardizing the means of communication and reducing the errors. However, it raises the “eyebrows” of many when it comes to patient confidentiality and privacy among healthcare organization.
The Problem is
1. Transfer of Information- The problem is remote access of the health records and pooling of large number of data for various purposes like research program and lab work, may lead to an error and confusion.
2. Lack of information centralization- Many patients keep their own records of blood sugars, weight and blood pressure by using various Internet tools. However, healthcare providers cannot access these records because they cannot streamline those records with EHR.
3. Security theft - Internet tools like Google health and Microsoft Vault provides conveni...

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...idence of users by agreeing to the policy that the data submitted to their cloud platform will be kept confidential. (Ryan, 2011)
The cloud computing is still under development but if it can manage to maintain information privacy and confidentiality than it will become revolutionary in healthcare field. And we never know, in future science and technology might introduce more advanced level of apps and service with enhanced level of privacy and security measures.
Patient personalized health cards are also long underling technology that might provide patient a freedom of owning his/her PHI. Transferring data from one hospital to another wouldn’t be a challenge with this password protected health cards. Privacy wouldn’t be much of an issue as all the information is stored in the chip of the card that can be retrieve by a healthcare provider or by patient when needed.

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