Losing patient information Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Losing patient information - Assignment Example Health care organizations expose patient’s data or even it gets stolen. Such information includes lab tests results, allergies, medications and other forms of clinical information stored in computers or physical files. Many hospitals use outdated and primitive technology that does not receive security updates and this may allow hackers to access employees’ login credentials. In addition, they rarely encrypt all the data kept since even the Federal Health Records Protection law and the Health Insurance Accountability act does not demand encryption by the health care firms (Park,  2014)) Patient’s data needs to be accessed at times for doctors and other medical physicians to be able to make decisions concerning the patient and how to improve patient care. Inability to access data at the right time may delay clinical decisions and ultimately affect patient care negatively. Similarly, patients have the right to ensure that their personal health information is protected and can only be shared on certain circumstances. It is thus the responsibility of the health care centers to install control measures and practices to ensure that patient data is secure from unauthorized people. They must document the use of patient information, share with patient about security and privacy issues as well as reporting any information loss. On the other hand, patients should contact the healthcare administration immediately once they suspect that their personal data has been misused ( Loukides, 2012). The healthcare doctors and management should be at the forefront of adopting and using digital medical and electronic health information that has many benefits and help eliminate risks of losing patient data. Health policy leaders should develop standards, policies and procedures, adopt newest technologies, and educate healthcare professionals and other physicians aimed at improving healthcare through data privacy, confidentiality and protection from loss (Kloss, 2012). In recent