A review into the evolution of HIPAA in response to evolving technological environments

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 was brought in to serve as a legislation that could essentially assist in reorganizing the flow of healthcare information, prescribing how sensitive medical data stored with healthcare/insurance firms should be protected from stealing and tampering. It has served as a pioneer in the world of privacy in healthcare and set one of the earliest benchmarks for any legal instruments regarding the storing and dissemination of medical information in the form of electronic health records. The HITECH act of 2009 and the HIPAA omnibus rule of 2013 further cemented the use of standardized frameworks which can help control, reduce and track any possible breaches of confidentiality and integrity of such personal information. This paper explores the content, reasoning, and timeline of the HIPAA act and the impact it creates on the health information technology sector. It also explains the challenges that are faced in the implementation of the policy and gives a holistic perspective of the rights and responsibilities of each stakeholder involved.

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The Impact of the Global, Extensible Electronic Health Record

Managing Healthcare Information Systems with Web-Enabled Technologies ◽

10.4018/978-1-878289-65-0.ch001 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 3-13 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

David W. Forslund ◽

David G. Kilman

Keyword(s):

Electronic Health Records ◽

Negative Impact ◽

Global Scale ◽

Global Perspective ◽

Health Records ◽

Technological Advances ◽

The World ◽

Electronic Health ◽

The Impact

With the arrival of the “World Wide Web,” we have witnessed a transition toward a truly global perspective with respect to electronic health records. In recent years, much more discussion has focused on the potential for international virtual electronic health records and what is required for them to become a reality in the world today (Kilman & Forslund, 1997). As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous and Web-enabled, we see access to electronic health records using these technologies becoming more commonplace. Even so, these Web-enabled health records still remain technologically isolated from other medical records in the distributed continuum of care; much of the standardization challenge still stands before us. We have witnessed startling technological advances, but we still face considerable obstacles to the goal of having globally standardized electronic health records. In this chapter we describe some of the issues associated with Web-enabled health records, the role of standards in the evolution of Web-enabled health records, and some of the barriers to the development of globally accessible electronic health records. We discuss possible ways to overcome these barriers and the kinds of benefits and opportunities that global health records will help provide. The global scale perspective makes more evident the very real and potentially tragic consequences of prolonged and unnecessary delays in deploying these technologies. Therefore, in an effort to promote a fuller consciousness of health safety, the chapter concludes with a comparative look at the negative impact of impediments in the movement toward global extensible electronic health records.

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The Regulation of Genetic Testing and the Protection of Genetic and Medical Information in Singapore

Genomics and Bioethics ◽

10.4018/978-1-61692-883-4.ch014 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 199-219

Author(s):

Terry Kaan

Keyword(s):

Genetic Testing ◽

Biomedical Research ◽

Medical Information ◽

Social Issues ◽

Personal Information ◽

Insurance Industry ◽

Special Treatment ◽

Privacy Concerns ◽

Genetic Exceptionalism ◽

The Impact

In the decades since its independence in 1965, the transformation of Singapore’s economy and its transition to a relatively developed economy has also in like manner transformed its health care system, and of the demands made of it. The emergence and availability of new medical technologies has put into sharp focus many novel legal, ethical as well as social issues. This chapter looks at how Singapore has attempted to respond to issues thrown up by genetic testing and screening technologies. A particular focus of this chapter will be the tension between privacy concerns, and the imperatives of access for biomedical research, given that biomedical research has been championed by the Singapore government as one of the future leading sectors of the economy of Singapore. This chapter also examines Singapore’s approach to the question of “genetic exceptionalism:” Does genetic information possess special qualities or attributes that remove it from the realm of ordinary personal information, and which thereby demands special treatment and protection? In this context, the impact of the doctrine of genetic exceptionalism on industry (in this case the insurance industry) is examined.

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The state of Canada’s tech sector, 2016

10.32920/ryerson.14636982 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Creig Lamb ◽

Matthew Seddon

Keyword(s):

Emerging Technologies ◽

Digital Technologies ◽

The State ◽

Information And Communications Technology ◽

Communications Technology ◽

Technology Sector ◽

The World ◽

Definition Of ◽

The Impact

As the tech sector continues to grow and emerging technologies from around the world become more common, it is now more important than ever to ensure Canada maintains its position as a growing, prominent tech economy. However, past efforts to define the tech sector, while useful, have almost exclusively focused on the information and communications technology sector. Today, technology has become so ubiquitous across all Canadian industries that this approach understates the true impact that the tech sector has on Canada’s economy. For this report, we developed the first pan-Canadian definition of Canada’s tech sector using a proven methodology that has defined other sectors internationally. It is our goal to identify the composition and accurately measure the impact that Canada’s tech sector has on the economy. Using our more encompassing definition, we found that Canada’s tech sector is exceptionally diverse, ranging from digital technologies to aerospace and pharmaceuticals. The sector is also much broader in size, scope and geography than ever before. It is truly a pan-Canadian sector with pan-Canadian impacts.

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Interoperable System for COVID-19

10.21203/rs.3.rs-961689/v3 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Yash Chaudhari ◽

Shelly Sachdeva ◽

Lakshita Aggarwal

Keyword(s):

Health Care ◽

Health Care Workers ◽

Human Error ◽

Low Cost ◽

Medical Data ◽

Digital Form ◽

Health Records ◽

Technology Sector ◽

Single Person ◽

Care Workers

Abstract In the year 2020, the world halted due to the spread of COVID-19 or SARS-CoV2 which was first identified in Wuhan, China. Since then, it has caused a plethora of problems around the globe such as the loss of millions of lives. India was one of the countries which were majorly affected by this pandemic. Thousands lost their lives and millions had to be hospitalized and taken into medical care. Due to this, there is an abundance of unorganized and redundant medical data in the Health Information Technology sector. Many hospitals contain various mismatched health records of a single person. We attempt to develop an Interoperable System specifically for COVID-19 using the openEHR standard to organize health records in digital form by creating Electronic Health Records. These records can be accessed and shared by multiple hospitals and clinics to reduce the redundancy of health records. This would establish effective communications between different hospitals and greatly make data sharing, efficient and low cost. Standardization can hugely affect medical errors. Interoperability provides hospitals to share across many channels and help Health care workers to detect discrepancies easily. Lives that are lost due to human error in the health care system can be minimized or even completely avoided. The number of hospitals using interoperable standards is still low and we hope that this paper will help make a change towards following the standard.

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Impact of the HITECH Act on physicians’ adoption of electronic health records

Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association ◽

10.1093/jamia/ocv103 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 23 (2) ◽

pp. 375-379 ◽

Cited By ~ 57

Author(s):

Stephen T Mennemeyer ◽

Nir Menachemi ◽

Saurabh Rahurkar ◽

Eric W Ford

Keyword(s):

Electronic Health Records ◽

Technology Use ◽

Statistical Significance ◽

Data Series ◽

Healthcare Outcomes ◽

Health Records ◽

Hitech Act ◽

Ehr Adoption ◽

Electronic Health ◽

The Impact

Abstract Background and Objective The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act has distributed billions of dollars to physicians as incentives for adopting certified electronic health records (EHRs) through the meaningful use (MU) program ultimately aimed at improving healthcare outcomes. The authors examine the extent to which the MU program impacted the EHR adoption curve that existed prior to the Act. Methods Bass and Gamma Shifted Gompertz (G/SG) diffusion models of the adoption of “Any” and “Basic” EHR systems in physicians’ offices using consistent data series covering 2001–2013 and 2006–2013, respectively, are estimated to determine if adoption was stimulated during either a PrePay (2009–2010) period of subsidy anticipation or a PostPay (2011–2013) period when payments were actually made. Results Adoption of Any EHR system may have increased by as much as 7 percentage points above the level predicted in the absence of the MU subsidies. This estimate, however, lacks statistical significance and becomes smaller or negative under alternative model specifications. No substantial effects are found for Basic systems. The models suggest that adoption was largely driven by “imitation” effects ( q -coefficient) as physicians mimic their peers’ technology use or respond to mandates. Small and often insignificant “innovation” effects (p-coefficient) are found suggesting little enthusiasm by physicians who are leaders in technology adoption. Conclusion The authors find weak evidence of the impact of the MU program on EHR uptake. This is consistent with reports that many current EHR systems reduce physician productivity, lack data sharing capabilities, and need to incorporate other key interoperability features (e.g., application program interfaces).

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The Regulation of Genetic Testing and the Protection of Genetic and Medical Information in Singapore

Clinical Technologies ◽

10.4018/978-1-60960-561-2.ch703 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 1853-1873

Author(s):

Terry Kaan

Keyword(s):

Genetic Testing ◽

Biomedical Research ◽

Medical Information ◽

Social Issues ◽

Personal Information ◽

Insurance Industry ◽

Special Treatment ◽

Privacy Concerns ◽

Genetic Exceptionalism ◽

The Impact

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Research on E-healthcare Security Evaluation in Cloud-Based System

International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering - 2 ◽

10.35940/ijrte.b1395.0982s1119 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 8 (2S11) ◽

pp. 3054-3058

Keyword(s):

Risk Management ◽

Data Privacy ◽

Medical Information ◽

Personal Information ◽

Healthcare Systems ◽

Security Evaluation ◽

Healthcare Industry ◽

Health Records ◽

Management Procedure ◽

Risk Management Process

As healthcare adopts electronic methods of storing patient health records, cloud technology allows mining and analyzing this data and accessing the general public health information. Patient’s privacy and security of personal information is crucial when considering using electronic health records in the healthcare industry (E-Healthcare). The need of the hour is to be able to store and recover patient’s data efficiently. However, moving patient’s medical information to the Cloud involves major security risks and destructs robust data privacy of health records. The threat of data breaches and the need to manage huge amounts of data are issues that have affected the healthcare industry for years. The privacy issues and threats faced by E-healthcare systems include network attacks and threats to hosts and unsanctioned access to EHR records. The major EHR system functions such as appointment scheduling, dietary planning, admission and discharge, transfer radiology/lab orders and prescription order entry are vulnerable to security threats. Security issues need to be assessed thoroughly in order for hospitals and other such medical institutions to shift to electronic standards of maintaining patient's data. Before moving to a cloud-based architecture, health organizations should perform a risk assessment. This will help to identify the security measures required to mitigate these risks. This approach provides a valid assessment of the security risk management procedure approved by field experts. It not only identifies threats to E-healthcare but also allows for a structured flow in risk management. The risk management process is documented and reported in an efficient and easy way for concerned stakeholders of the E-healthcare to understand. It will compare existing solutions on how to protect the confidentiality of patient information. Some of these methods include implementation of a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model, digital encryption and signature for cloud security and EHR service continuity management. Moreover, it will consider security matters that CSP’s should look into while storing patient’s record. Ultimately, it will come up with the most suitable solution to make E-Healthcare systems more secure. In this paper, the focus will be on identifying security encounters that E-health systems face by discussing means in which these systems are susceptible to attacks.

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An epidemic model for economical impact predicting and spatiotemporal spreading of COVID-19

10.1101/2020.09.02.20186551 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Mateo Cámara ◽

Mario Miravete ◽

Eduardo Navarro

Keyword(s):

Artificial Intelligence ◽

Economic Activity ◽

Relevant Information ◽

Medical Data ◽

Point Of View ◽

Epidemiological Models ◽

Population Movements ◽

Economic Point ◽

The World ◽

The Impact

Since the emergence of a new strain of coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2, many countries around the world have reported cases of COVID-19 disease caused by this virus. Numerous people's lives have been affected both from a health and an economic point of view. The long tradition of using mathematical models to generate insights about the transmission of a disease, as well as new computer techniques such as Artificial Intelligence, have opened the door to diverse investigations providing relevant information about the evolution of COVID-19. In this research, we seek to advance the existing epidemiological models based on microscopic Markov chains to predict the impact of the pandemic at medical and economic levels. For this purpose, we have made use of the Spanish population movements based on mobile-phone geographically-located information to determine its economic activity using Artificial Intelligence techniques and have developed a novel advanced epidemiological model that combines this information with medical data. With this tool, scenarios can be released with which to determine which restriction policies are optimal and when they have to be applied both to limit the destruction of the economy and to avoid the feared possible upsurge of the disease.

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Two Years Experience with a Medical Computer File in Insurance Medicine

Methods of Information in Medicine ◽

10.1055/s-0038-1635714 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 14 (04) ◽

pp. 199-201

Author(s):

D. Lahaye ◽

D. Roosels ◽

J. Viaene

Keyword(s):

Medical Records ◽

Medical Information ◽

Medical Data ◽

Computer File ◽

Medical Computer ◽

Stored Information ◽

Medical Examinations ◽

The Impact ◽

Work Method ◽

Selection Of

The drafting of a medical computer file for pneumoconiosis at the Fund of Occupational Diseases was essentially based on an intuitive choice of medical information processing from a large experience. For statistical purposes, however, a more scientific selection of stored information is needed. Therefore, we checked out the medical data on 25,830 complete medical records. The frequency of all answer possib-ilities was tested question by question. A minority of questions had to be reexamined because the yled to insufficient answers. It will be possible in the future to improve the storage of medical information with this work method. A further investigation in which the results achieved by several physicians will be compared opens the possibility of rating the impact of subjective judgments in medical examinations.

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Performability Evaluation of Load Balancing and Fail-over Strategies for Medical Information Systems with Edge/Fog Computing Using Stochastic Reward Nets

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21186253 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (18) ◽

pp. 6253

Author(s):

Tuan Anh Nguyen ◽

Iure Fe ◽

Carlos Brito ◽

Vishnu Kumar Kaliappan ◽

Eunmi Choi ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Information Systems ◽

Load Balancing ◽

Medical Information ◽

Virtual Machines ◽

Medical Data ◽

Medical Services ◽

Medical Information Systems ◽

Medical Centers ◽

High Level ◽

The Impact

The aggressive waves of ongoing world-wide virus pandemics urge us to conduct further studies on the performability of local computing infrastructures at hospitals/medical centers to provide a high level of assurance and trustworthiness of medical services and treatment to patients, and to help diminish the burden and chaos of medical management and operations. Previous studies contributed tremendous progress on the dependability quantification of existing computing paradigms (e.g., cloud, grid computing) at remote data centers, while a few works investigated the performance of provided medical services under the constraints of operational availability of devices and systems at local medical centers. Therefore, it is critical to rapidly develop appropriate models to quantify the operational metrics of medical services provided and sustained by medical information systems (MIS) even before practical implementation. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive performability SRN model of an edge/fog based MIS for the performability quantification of medical data transaction and services in local hospitals or medical centers. The model elaborates different failure modes of fog nodes and their VMs under the implementation of fail-over mechanisms. Sophisticated behaviors and dependencies between the performance and availability of data transactions are elaborated in a comprehensive manner when adopting three main load-balancing techniques including: (i) probability-based, (ii) random-based and (iii) shortest queue-based approaches for medical data distribution from edge to fog layers along with/without fail-over mechanisms in the cases of component failures at two levels of fog nodes and fog virtual machines (VMs). Different performability metrics of interest are analyzed including (i) recover token rate, (ii) mean response time, (iii) drop probability, (iv) throughput, (v) queue utilization of network devices and fog nodes to assimilate the impact of load-balancing techniques and fail-over mechanisms. Discrete-event simulation results highlight the effectiveness of the combination of these for enhancing the performability of medical services provided by an MIS. Particularly, performability metrics of medical service continuity and quality are improved with fail-over mechanisms in the MIS while load balancing techniques help to enhance system performance metrics. The implementation of both load balancing techniques along with fail-over mechanisms provide better performability metrics compared to the separate cases. The harmony of the integrated strategies eventually provides the trustworthiness of medical services at a high level of performability. This study can help improve the design of MIS systems integrated with different load-balancing techniques and fail-over mechanisms to maintain continuous performance under the availability constraints of medical services with heavy computing workloads in local hospitals/medical centers, to combat with new waves of virus pandemics.

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