Week 1 Assignments
Assignment #1
In this paper, the article “Going digital: A survey on digitalization and large-scale data analytics in healthcare” by Tresp et al. (2016) is proposed for sharing. It contains a comprehensive overview of digitalization trends in healthcare, and it is most recent. Therefore, it might catch the attention of peers and provide them with some valuable insights, trend examples, and discussion topics, even though the authors do not expect the article to be used by professionals.
The authors present the topic of data used in healthcare (highlighting its importance), offer a definition of the terms “digitalization” and “digital health,” and consider the driving forces for digitalization, including political and economic ones. In general, the paper is aimed at considering the way healthcare has changed and is likely to proceed to change as a result of digitalization. The authors suggest that digitalization is going to expand, and the benefits and issues that it brings along are going to become more widespread.
In particular, transparency, quality, and safety are expected to increase together with collaboration in the field of healthcare-related scientific research. However, the efforts and costs aimed at digitalization as well as the difficulties related to information management and integration (confounders, biases, batch effects) are also likely to become more common and, therefore, problematic. Also, the challenge of privacy protection is considered throughout the paper.
Other trends that the authors have pinpointed and expect to expand include the patient-centered, personalized, and patient-managed healthcare. It is noteworthy that these suggestions overlap with those of Caceres (2013) or Steinhubl and Topol (2015) who also contemplate the future of healthcare beyond digitization. Apparently, they expect the synergy of human efforts and modern technology abilities to be aimed at improved quality and efficiency as well as greater patient-centeredness and inclusiveness, and my personal experience of these trends suggests the same outcomes for healthcare beyond digitization.
Assignment #2
According to Tresp et al. (2016), cases of privacy breach do take place in healthcare disturbingly often (p. 2191). As a result, it is important to review the activities that a health care provider or institution can do to protect patients’ privacy.
With respect to patient privacy, the notion of Protected Health Information (PHI) is of particular importance. PHI includes the “medical data and personally identifiable information” that is used in medical records and protected with the help of “technical, administrative, and physical controls” which are established by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) (Rhodes-Ousley, 2013, pp. 5, 815).
A healthcare provider (person or organization) will sufficiently contribute to the safety of patients’ privacy by complying with HIPAA. Therefore, it is apparent that a health care professional would be required to make an effort to be aware of HIPAA legislation, comply with it, and push for compliance at the organizational level. Similarly, the advocacy for the implementation of modern, more secure technology can be regarded as a contribution to privacy protection by a health care professional. Indeed, in his contribution to the International Forum on Information and Documentation of 1998, Marc Rotenberg (1998) stated, among other things, that the right to privacy is not only endangered by modern technology, it can also be protected by it.
While individual professionals are unlikely to have more than advisory votes in this respect, organizations and institutions are directly responsible for employing innovative technology and promoting its development and implementation, which is one of the most valid activities in ensuring patient privacy. Nowadays, the best practices in the field include cryptography (a most well-developed and popular approach) and non-cryptographic authorization policies and infrastructures (Abbas & Khan, 2014). Apart from that, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, phishing protection, and other specifically targeted methods can help an institution to develop a sound and consistent strategy of privacy protection (Daya, 2013).
References
Abbas, A. & Khan, S. (2014). A Review on the State-of-the-Art Privacy-Preserving Approaches in the e-Health Clouds. IEEE Journal Of Biomedical And Health Informatics, 18(4), 1431-1441. Web.
Caceres, S. (2013). Electronic health records: beyond the digitization of medical files. Clinics, 68(8), 1077-1078. Web.
Daya, B. (2013). Network security: History, importance, and future. Web.
Rhodes-Ousley, M. (2013). Information Security: The Complete Reference, Second Edition (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Rotenberg, M. (1998). Preserving privacy in the information society. Web.
Steinhubl, S. & Topol, E. (2015). Moving from digitalization to digitization in cardiovascular care. Journal of The American College Of Cardiology, 66(13), 1489-1496. Web.
Tresp, V., Overhage, J., Bundschus, M., Rabizadeh, S., Fasching, P., & Yu, S. (2016). Going digital: A survey on digitalization and large-scale data analytics in healthcare. Proceedings Of The IEEE, 104(11), 2180-2206. Web.