Today’s sphere of healthcare is closely related to the process of technological advancement, as the community’s concern about health cannot be imagined in isolation from the social background. For this reason, the administrative part of healthcare, along with preventative medicine, has recently become digitalized. Such a process implies creating an extensive database of patient histories, which can be accessed both by the healthcare facilities and patients.
Although health information access is, by all means, beneficial for the productivity aspect, the notion of privacy and information confidentiality is reasonably questioned (Shanholtzer & Ozanich, 2015). Thus, in order to secure privacy, the US government has adopted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which regulates the patterns of sharing and storing sensitive health information concerning the patients (Health Information Technology, 2018).
To begin with, the creation of a digital database is one of the best decisions in terms of efficient information exchange between medical facilities and departments (Godbolt & Reid, 2019). On the other hand, however, the implications of privacy sometimes require patients’ individual consent to share some vulnerable information, making the overall process slower than usual.
Since the law introduction, some of the most challenging concerns in terms of patient privacy seem to have been tackled properly. However, according to some researchers, the extent to which this information is secure should be enhanced by means of up-to-date cyber-security measures (Shanholtzer & Ozanich, 2015). Moreover, the latest report introduced by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT, 2018) claimed the need to pay more attention to the socio-cultural peculiarities of patient privacy. Considering personal experience, it may be concluded that the potential efforts in the field of health information protection should deal with the issues of information leaks and misuse within the medical facilities.
References
Center for Democracy and Technology (2018). Heal-gorithms: Understanding the potential for bias in mHealth apps [PDF document]. Web.
Godbolt, S., & Reid, L. (2019). Partnerships in health information: Sharing knowledge, ambition and passion to deliver improvements in health information. HLG Nursing Bulletin, 39(1), 19–32.
Health Information Technology. (2018). Health information privacy law and policy. Web.
Shanholtzer, B. M., & Ozanich, G. (2015). Health information management and technology. McGraw-Hill Education.