Patient Safety Report: IT Innovations as an Impediment

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Table of Contents

Summary and Introduction
Incident
Measures Taken
The issue to Be Addressed
Factors Contributing to the Dilemma
Further Measures
Preventing Similar Instances from Occurring
Medico-Legal Issues Associated
Works Cited

Summary and Introduction

The incorporation of the latest IT tools into the process of healthcare facilities’ operation can be viewed as both a major step forward and an impediment to the provision of high-quality services to the patients. The specified paradox can be attributed to the fact that most healthcare facilities do not provide training courses aimed at improving the employees’ command of IT tools. As a result, the misuse of IT innovations such as databases containing patients’ personal information may lead to exposure to cyberattacks and the following leakage of the patients’ personal information (Banerjee et al. 285).

Incident

The employees of a local healthcare facility providing inpatient services for the local citizens and offering 220 beds were supposed to arrange the patients’ data according to the provided classification in the electronic database that had lately been created for the needs of the personnel. Among the people whose needs the members of the facility tended to, there were patients with HIV. According to the hospital’s policy, the principles of non-disclosure were accepted as the basis for tending to the needs of the patients and arranging their information. However, one of the patients complained about their personal information regarding their HIV status leaking online and causing turmoil in the social network among the people, who knew the patient personally (Perakslis 396).

Measures Taken

Much to the credit of the members of the facility in question, the measures taken to address the conflict were rapid and quite professional. First and most obvious, the security rates were increased several times in the organization. Apart from updating the passwords for the hospital’s databases, the IT staff incorporated a multi-vendor approach (Burleson and Carrara 59) into the framework of the hospital’s security.

The issue to Be Addressed

One must admit, though, that the development of complex passwords and any other tools for the external enhancement of security measures are doomed to failure unless the corresponding changes are made among the staff members. A closer look at the hospital and its employees will reveal that the healthcare practitioners working in it have little to no idea about how the IT security tools work. For instance, the staff must be instructed to log out of the company’s site by clicking the “log out” button instead of pressing the red “x” in the upper right corner of the screen. Moreover, the

More importantly, the significance of non-disclosure of any information related to patients, including both the environment of the hospital setting and the one that staff members spend the rest of the day in must be viewed as the top priority.

Factors Contributing to the Dilemma

Apart from the lack of skills concerning the use of the corresponding IT tools, which the staff members displayed, one must name the lack of proper quality management and information transfer strategies as the key factor contributing to the emergence of the problem. Indeed, a closer look at the subject matter will show that, if the quality standards were up-to-date in the organization, the employees would have been instructed on the proper use of online databases, and the problem in question would have never occurred in the first place.

Further Measures

Even though the measures taken by the members of the hospital immediately after the accident occurred can be deemed as fairly adequate, the specified steps can only be viewed as a temporary solution to the problem. Unless additional measures are undertaken, similar instances are going to occur regularly. Therefore, it will be necessary to make sure that the staff members are fully aware of the significance of patients’ data safety (Yıldız et al. 269). Moreover, one must make sure that the staff members are capable of providing the required level of data security. In other words, training is required to enhance the employees’ IT proficiency.

Although the creation of an IT training program can be viewed as a rather expensive and challenging task, its positive effects are bound to have an enormous magnitude. Apart from preventing further instances of cyberattacks, the specified step is likely to reinvent the employees’ overall concept of information management and make the need to provide patient data safety obvious. In addition, the leadership strategy in the specified facility needs to be reconsidered. As soon as the importance of the hospital’s ethical principles based on virtue ethics (Morrison and Furlong 22) is acknowledged and accepted by all staff members, the process of learning the new IT skills is bound to occur at a faster pace.

Preventing Similar Instances from Occurring

There is no need to stress the fact that the incorporation of the corresponding IT tools into the operation of modern healthcare facilities is an essential step toward the promotion of patients’ safety and the improvement of healthcare services. However, as the above-mentioned experience has shown, integrating IT tools into the operation of hospitals takes time. Therefore, training courses must be provided for all staff members so that the healthcare service members could use the specified tools in a manner as efficiently as possible and avoid further instances of security breaches. Particularly, the staff members need to be educated on the issue of cybersecurity and its enhancement.

Medico-Legal Issues Associated

The problem concerning the patients’ data security is one of the major issues in the contemporary healthcare area. Particularly, the current legislation concerning patient data confidentiality known as the HIPAA Security Rule deserves to be brought up as one of the tools for regulating the specified concerns. According to the existing definition, the specified regulation “sets national standards for the security of electronically protected health information” (“Health Information Privacy” par. 1). In other words, by complying with the key postulates of the specified regulation, U.S. healthcare facilities are likely to provide their patients with the required level of confidentiality and data security. In other words, by exposing patients to the threat of personal information leakage, healthcare services break the information privacy regulation of the U.S. Constitution.

Works Cited

Banerjee, Ayan, Krishna K. Venkatasubramanian, Tridib Mukherjee, and Sandeep Kumar S. Gupta. “Ensuring Safety, Security, and SustainabilityofMission-Critical Cyber–Physical Systems.” Proceedings of the IEEE 100.1 (2011): 283–299. Print.

Burleson, Wayne, and Sandro Carrara. Security and Privacy for Implantable Medical Devices. New York City, NY: Springer Science & Business Media, 2014. Print.

Health Information Privacy2015. Web.

Morrison, Eleen, and Beth Furlong. Health Care Ethics. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2014. Print.

Perakslis, Eric D. “Cybersecurity in Health Care.” The New England Journal of Medicine 371.5 (2014): 395–397. Print.

Yıldız, Dilek, Berna Eren Fidancı, Vesile Ünver, Hülya Saray Kılıç, Ayla Yava,and Nuran Tosun. “Views of Senior Nursing Students on Patient Safety.” Gülhane Tıp Derg 55.1 (2013): 269-275. Print.

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