Question

How can institutional Internet policies protect patient privacy? What specifically can nurses do to protect patient privacy when using the Internet?

Answer 1

Protecting patient information are the most important aspect in the healthcare sector are as following

• Ensuring there is a board which governs and supervises the patient information under well trained skillful staffs like security officers
• Encryption of all data as much as possible .This can reduce the major consequences in case of loss of hospital devices or theft
• Limitation or restriction to the training students to go through patient information without any hospital supervision or by the staffs
• Having a good security when the transmission of patient information happens between health care organization for continuity of care
• Providing individualized passwords for each professionals
• Following a strict policy in protection of patient privacy
• Issuing medical records upon proper pre request and pre authobybthe concerned physician
• Issuing only the required data when it comes to legal cases
• Risk assessment periodically
• Maintaining a single copy of the data
• Policies separately for each data
• Ensure compliance with HIPAA

Some of the things which the nurses has to specifically do to protect patient privacy when iding internet are

• Not using public or social media sites when handling patient data
• To use only the internet for knowledge gathering and not to disclose it it other sites.
• Avoid using multiple sites at a time
• To follow the organization policies
• Passwords should not be shared or the data to be left open after usage