Question

While discussing the increased use of technology to gather, store, and access healthcare information, senior nursing students discuss the importance of preventing data security breaches and the implication of such breaches on nurses professionally. The class is divided into groups to research and prepare information on various relevant topics to present to the entire class (Learning Objectives: 1, 2, and 4).

1. A group is assigned to create a summary of information related to the ethical aspects of electronic data collection to the profession of nursing. What information will be included?
2. A group of students is assigned to research information regarding a healthcare organizational risk assessment. What will that group focus upon?

Answer 1

First group :-

# . An electronic health record (EHR) is a record of a patient's medical details (including history, physical examination, investigations and treatment) in digital format. Physicians and hospitals are implementing EHRs because they offer several advantages over paper records. They increase access to health care, improve the quality of care and decrease costs. However, ethical issues related to EHRs confront health personnel. There are four main ethical priorities for EHR :-

1.- privacy and confidentiality means having access to the patients health information by authorized personnel only. They have access to the information they need to carry out their responsibilities. Hence assigning user privileges is a major aspect of medical record security.

Although controlling access to health information is important, but is not sufficient for protecting the confidentiality. Additional security steps such as strong privacy and security policies are essential to secure patient's information.

2.- Security breaches means it threaten patient privacy when confidential health information is made available to others without the individual's consent or authorization.

3.- system implementation - Health care organizations encounter major challenges in the course of EHR implementation these challenges result in wasted resources, frustrated providers, loss of confidence by patients and patient safety issues. The development, implementation, and maintenance of EHRs requires adequate funds and the involvement of many individuals, including clinicians, information technologists, educators, and consultants.

4.- data inaccuracies - while collection of data , integrity has to be ensured that the data is accurate and has not been changed . EHR serves in many ways to improve the quality of services to the patient while sometimes due to inaccurate data it causes a mess in the functioning like for example use of cut and copy or inappropriate menu buttons would change the data all over and cause a cios.

Second group :-

While collection of data regarding healthcare organization risk assessment ,the group should focus on the following points :-

- does the organization has a risk assessment tool or performa

- if they have the performa ,then verify whether it is the universal one , is that applicable for every condition etc

- is there any recording of the risk assessment done ,if yes manual or digital

- verify that as per the risk assessment actions are made .