Your office has recently switched from paper to electronic health records. Your manager has noticed that some employees share logins and passwords, and some walk away from their computers without logging out. Your office manager has asked you to write an office memo about protecting electronic health information.

Protecting Electronic Health Information

Electronic health information systems are systems that document and store individual health data. These systems detail individual patient’s past medical and medication histories as well as their current health status. Health information, being confidential, needs to be protected from parties that would otherwise use this information for malicious acts. It is, therefore, the responsibility of those with access to this information to guard it against such persons. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), is a federal statute that gives provisions for such safeguards. This paper seeks to discuss the protection of electronic health data.

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a federal statute that is geared towards ensuring that an individual’s health information is protected from malicious acts. This act establishes standards that guide the utilization and handling of patient’s health information. This act also gives individuals authority over their health information and enables them to choose whom to share this information with. The privacy rule under this act addresses the use and disclosure of protected health information by entities that are subject to this rule. Such entities include healthcare providers, health clearinghouses, and health plans, among others. The overall goal of this act is to ensure that individual health data remains confidential and maintain freedom from persons who may otherwise utilize this information for malicious activities (Farhadi et al., 2019). This act confers several significance to both the healthcare organization and the individual patients.

The importance of HIPAA is evident in enhanced efficiency in the healthcare industry. The HIPAA Act directs the institution of electronic health records. These electronic records enhance the flow of health information across healthcare providers and thus reduces significantly the time that would have otherwise been utilized in paper recording and documentation. The systems as well enhance the safety of healthcare operations by ensuring that the integrity of health data is not distorted during transmission, as would have otherwise been the case in the paper recording. Additionally, the systems enable smooth transmission of health data to other healthcare organizations, thus facilitating a health referral system. All these factors ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery processes.

HIPAA is also important to the patients. This act directs for the safeguarding of patients’ protected health information. This act directs the establishment of a framework that ensures that patient’s health information remains confidential. The act clearly articulates persons authorized access to this information and reinforces the need to ensure that this information is safeguarded from parties that would have otherwise utilized this information with ill intent.

Electronic health record systems remain to be significant tools that enable the safeguarding of patient information. These systems’ design is so that they enable access to only authorized persons. Login information is usually given to those authorized to access this information. Sharing of login information is considerably discouraged as it opens conduits that may cause leakage of an individual’s health information. Entities authorized access are subject to the HIPAA security rule and should, therefore, ensure that they safeguard this information in any way possible (Oyeleye, 2021). Sharing of logins may not only jeopardize this security but also facilitate access to unauthorized persons.

Effective protection of patient information can be ensured by several ways and methods. The utilization of electronic health record systems is one of the ways. The electronic health records system design should be that which enables it to be tamper-proof and resistant to hacking. This is significant in eliminating external access in the form of hacking. The system should as well possess security checks such as passwords, which are only given to authorized persons. This is important in locking out persons who would have otherwise accessed this system but are not authorized. Additionally, the system should enable automatic log-outs once the users’ session is over to lock out parties that would have otherwise accessed this system from an authorized person’s account. The system should also possess automatic corrective features and backups that can detect malicious activities, change login information on detection of external threats, and enable the retrieval of patient health data whenever shut down externally or during such corrective processes (Колпаков & Петренко, 2018). Policies that govern the handling of patient information are another method. Such policies as HIPAA o