Health Information Exchange: Benefits and Concerns Essay

Health Information Exchange is the electronic contagious disease modify from one wellness cargon professional to another. Health Information Exchange allows wellness safeguard professionals and patients to appropriately access and securely share patients health check randomness electronically. Our industry is been organiseing hard in the process and development of this new process, for the benefit of the patient and health dread professionals. Some individuals with access to speed are physicians, nurses, pharmacists, medical assistants, medical biller and coders and so forth. It is important to have an understanding about different health care professionals having access to the patient medical record. run benefits includeProvides improvement for quality and safety of patient care by reducing prescription and medical errors. The education and orientation to patients involvement in their profess health care. Increases efficiency by eliminating unnecessary paperwork.Provides c aregivers with clinical decision tide over tools for more effective care and treatment. Eliminates redundant or unnecessary examen.Improves public health reporting and monitoring.Creates a potential loop for feedback between health-related research and actual give. Facilitates efficient deployment of emerging technology and health care work. Provides the backbone of technical home for leverage by national and State-level initiatives. Provides a basic level of interoperability among electronic health records (EHRs) maintained by individual physicians and organizations. Reduces health related costs(The benefits & fortunes of health information exchange & health information technology. (n.d.). The first step in EHR implementation is to conduct an assessment of your current enforce and its goals, necessitys, and financial and technical readiness. Your practice can design an implementation plan that meets the specific needs of your practice. Eligible health care professionals and eligible hospitals must use certified EHR technology in order to achieve meaningful use and qualify for incentive payments. It is important in an EHR when working in the implementation process to involve, training, mock go-live, and pilot testing for system improvement. ( race benefits) The final phase of EHR implementation includes successfully attesting to demonstrating meaningful use of EHRs, and reassessing what you have learned from training and everyday use of the system implementation to sustain improving workflows that achieve the individual practices goals.The process and steps to follow on an HER system, most health care providers are cover entities, and thus, need HIPAA responsibilities for individually identifiable health information. Your leadership especially emphasizing the importance of protecting patient health information is vital to your hiding and bail activities. HIPAA requires covered providers to designate an individual for both a privacy and a security m easure officer on their staff and delegate the responsibility of security system in a practice. Documentation shows why and where you have security measures in place, how you created them, and what you do to monitor them. Create a paper or electronic folder for your practice medical records. The Center of Medicare Services advises all providers that attest for the EHR incentive programs to retain all relevant records that support attestation.These records will be essential if you ever are audited for compliance with HIPAA or an EHR incentive program. (Anthony, R. (2013, September 19). Cms and ehealth.) Risk Analysis Plan compares your current security measures to what is legally andpragmatically call for to safeguard patient health information. The find outline identifies high priority threats and vulnerabilities on EHR. You or a security risk professional can conduct your practices risk analysis, but you either way you will want to know what to expect.Often, basic security measu res can be highly effective and affordable. Using your risk analysis results, discuss and develop an action plan to mitigate the identified risks. The plan should have five components administrative, physical, and technical safeguards policies and procedures and organizational standards. (Health information exchange Is your privacy protected?. (2012, July) Every practice should develop a Risk Management Plan. It is the practice responsibility to develop written and street smart policies and procedures about how your practice protects e-PHI. All these records should be retained on all outdated policies and procedures for future audits on your practice. For the security of patient health information (PHI), your workforce must know how to implement your policies, procedures, and security audits. HIPAA requires you as a covered provider to train your workforce on policies and procedures.Also, your staff must receive formal training on intermit notification. (Health information exchan ge Is your privacy protected? (2012, July) Your patients may be concerned about confidentiality and security of health information on an EHR. Emphasize the benefits of EHRs to them as patients, perhaps apply patient education materials available in the Privacy & Security Resources section. Do not register and attest for an EHR Incentive program until you have conducted your security risk analysis (or reassessment) and corrected any deficiencies identified during the risk analysis. Document these changes/corrections. Providers participating in the EHR Incentive Program can be audited. When you attest to meaningful use, it is a legal statement that you have met specific standards, including that you protect ePHI. Work with your EHR vendor(s) to let them know that protecting patient health information and meeting your HIPAA privacy and security responsibilities regarding electronic health information in your EHR is one of your major goals. Involve your practice staff and any other par tners that you have to help streamline this process. HIPAA privacy regulationsHealth Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). The Privacy Rule standards address the use and disclosure of individuals health informationcalled protected health information by organizations subject to the Privacy Rule called covered entities, as well as standards for individuals privacy rights to understand and control how their health information is used. Within HHS, the Office for urbane Rights (OCR) has responsibility for implementing and enforcing the Privacy Rule with respect to voluntary compliance activities and civil money penalties. HITECHThe Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was signed into law on February 17, 2009, to promote the credence and meaningful use of health information technology. Subtitle D of the HITECH Act addresses the privacy and security conc erns associated with the electronic transmission of health information, in part, through several provisions that strengthen the civil and criminal enforcement of the HIPAA rules. Standards & InteroperabilityThe work promoting the adoption and uptake of health information technology is the key to ensuring the goals of the HITECH Act. But work being done to ensure that the technical standards and specifications are in place to support this technology is also critical to the development and success of a fully functional nationwide health IT ecosystem. Some of the Risks of HIE include identicalness stealingAlthough health information benefits from all the security measures veritable in other economic areas such(prenominal) as defense and finance, it has the same risks these other areas have experienced. Identity theft can occur with both paper files and electronic files, but a breach of electronic files may affect more records than a breach of paper files. ErrorsJust like a paper heal th record, if the health care provider does not enter the correct information, that information remains in the health record until it is corrected. Electronic information can provide checks and balances thatpaper health records cannot. HackersElectronic health care information benefits from the security measure developed by other industries. Health care is the last frontier of information technology, so anti-hacking security measures from other economic areas are already used. However, hackers will detain to try to break security codes just like they do in other electronic systems. EncryptionCovered entities must encrypt protected health information when it is a reasonable and appropriate safeguard. When the HIPAA Security Rule was implemented in 2002, encryption was high in cost and challenging to use. The result is that many covered entities still do not encrypt their data. With the enormous amount of personal medical information that will be moving around electronically as HIE g ets underway and spreads, the U.S. section of Health and Human Services (HHS) needs to make encryption a requirement and set standards for its use in all practices. Personal mobile devicesSmartphones, tablets and USB drives are ubiquitous. Health care providers often use their own unsecured devices to record and transmit unencrypted work-related health information. The speed with which such devices have been adopted is well ahead of policies that govern their use. According to a number of recent studies, the vulnerability of mobile devices is already playing a large role in medical data breaches. The cloudThat is, remote servers where more and more businesses are moving their datawill be essential in an era of electronic health information exchange, if for no other reason than the staggering quantities of data that digitizing the medical records of the entire U.S. population will create. Health care providers may also want to host their patient portals on cloud-based servers. Pati ent portals are websites where patients can access their medical records and exchange email with their providers. Cloud services are developing more quickly than laws or regulations can address. As a patient youre unlikely to know where your medical records actually reside. And youre forced to rely on the security practices of others toprotect the privacy of your information.The Privacy Rule gives you, with few exceptions, the right to inspect, review, and receive a copy of your medical records and cathexis records that are held by health plans and health care providers covered by the Privacy Rule. Only you or your personal representative has the right to access your records. A health care provider or health plan may send copies of your records to another provider or health plan as requisite for treatment or payment or as authorized by you. However, the Privacy Rule does not require the health care provider or health plan to share information with other providers or plans. You do not have the right to access a providers psychotherapy notes. Psychotherapy notes are notes taken by a mental health professional during a conversation with the patient and kept separate from the patients medical and billing records. The Privacy Rule also does not permit the provider to make most disclosures of psychotherapy notes about you without your authorization. Because HIEs elementary purpose is to improve the quality of medical care, your health care providers priorities are to gain and allow access to a comprehensive record of your medical history.When the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) finalizes its accounting of disclosures rule, providers that maintain EHRs will have to account to you for all disclosures of your personal health information that it makes for purposes of treatment, payment, and business operations for deuce-ace eld prior to the date of your request. (Health information exchange draft examines privacy and security concerns. (2012, Ju ne 13). Until HHS rule is final, you can get an accounting that goes back six years prior to your request, but this DOES NOT include disclosures for treatment, payment, or business operations. Therefore the disclosures you are currently able to get may seem largely sketchy and irrelevant to the purposes for which you want them. You also have access to your own medical records (apart from psychotherapy notes about you), but you must request them directly from your providers. It is not achievable to request your records through an HIE.It has to be in person from the practice you are requesting medical records from. However, your doctor should be able to give youor will short be able to give youwhats called a Continuity of Care Record (CCR) after each visit. The CCR is a summary of the most relevant and up-to-date facts about your care and treatment with that provider. A CCR can be helpful for you, and can alsoprovide a current snapshot of your medical consideration for the next do ctor you visit. A CCR may be transmitted either on paper or electronically. HIE is a tremendous tool to expend in the healthcare industry. However, different challenges still existing now days. Effective and Affordable Technology is a big issue and the primary problem. HIE required costly network, connections hardware, software and so forth. Some practices including hospitals cant afford the cost of technology.Providers are trying to save in cost of information transmission and are always looking for inexpensive vendors. Practices are also working on overcoming these obstacles, but are very hard to overcome. HIEs can support care management by making it possible to generate patient reports for use at the point of care. It may also be easier to identify patients who are not following a prescribed care regimen or not meeting its goals, and to measure how well providers are delivering recommended care. This all goes along with the governments goal of shifting the health care payment m odel from one of fee for service to payment based on outcomes that is, not just whether you cut a doctor but whether you benefited from seeing her. The goals of HIE are to improve the quality of care and make delivering it more efficient and cost-effective. Once electronic medical records are available everywhere, for all patients, though, it is inevitable that more people will want access to this data. It is a goldmine for medical research and all kinds of statistical analysis, for example. ConclusionHIE will continue providing planning and implementation within health care organizations. We must comply as HIM professionals providing the best of our knowledge to give way in this process. Also we need to follow HIPPA policies and procedures in our place of employment and commit ourselves to meet our goal which is providing the best on patient care. The more we work as a team at the end of the road it will be easier on us to have our job done and accurate at the end of the road. Av oiding errors is also our responsibility as an HIM professionals. Lets not focus on productivity, which is important, but also lets put ourselves in the patients situation. We are also patients and we like to have things done the right way.ReferencesRhodes, H. (2013, August 05). Seven unintended consequences of electronic HIE. Retrieved from http//www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/reports HIE benefits. (n.d.). Retrieved fromhttp//www.healthit.gov/providers-professionals/health-information-exchange/hie-benefits The benefits & risks of health information exchange & health information technology. (n.d.). Retrieved from http//www.nchica.org/GetInvolved/CACHI/HIEbenefits-risks.htm Anthony, R. (2013, September 19). Cms and ehealth. Retrieved from http//www.cms.gov/eHealth/downloads/Webinar_eHealth_September19_CMSeHealthOverview.pdf Health information exchange Is your privacy protected?. (2012, July). Retrieved from https//www.privacyrights.org/fs/fsC6/CA-medical-HIE Health information exchange brief examines privacy and security concerns. (2012, June 13). Retrieved from https//www.cdt.org/pr_statement/health-information-exchange-brief-examines-privacy-and-security-concerns