HEALTH INFORMATION SENSITIVITY AND DATA PROTECTION

Health Information Sensitivity and Data Protection

Healthcare Information Sensitivity and Data Protection

This paper provides a comparison of three healthcare organizations and their policies regarding data protection.

1. Common Themes

As far as the common themes in policies of 'Beth Israel', Mayo Clinic, and Georgetown University Hospital is concerned, the new regulations require these organizations to take extra precautions to secure information, including data on mobile devices at work place. PatientSite includes full access to problem lists, medications, allergies, visits, laboratory results, diagnostic test results, and microbiology results from these three hospitals (Worthley 2000). In addition to these hospital- and ambulatory clinic-provided data, patients can amend their own records online, adding home glucometer readings, over--counter medications, and notes. Full secure patient-doctor messaging is integrated into system. Convenience functions such as appointment making, medication renewal, and specialist referral are automated and easy to use.

Additionally, the screening data is being securely uploaded by Mayo Clinic to Health Data Warehouse, which is housed and managed by the third-party health information company. As part of upload process, these healthcare organizations will match this information with your existing health data (e.g., health claims and prior health assessments) and will immediately eliminate personal identifiers, making this data impersonal and not attributable to any specific person (Tan 1998). After data has been loaded and identifying information removed, it serves purpose of evaluating program usage and effectiveness, while protecting against release of personal health information.

Similarly, the data protection policies of these organizations aim to detail how Beth Israel, Mayo, and Georgetown Hospital meet their legal obligations and requirements concerning confidentiality and information security standards. All legislation relevant to the individual's right of confidence and ways in which that can be achieved and maintained are paramount to Hospital (Rognehaugh 1999). This relates to roles that are reliant ...