By Dan Cidon
COVID-19 is changing nearly everything about the way healthcare organizations operate. From telehealth visits and elective surgeries to staffing strategies and sanitation protocols, hospitals and health systems are being forced to re-examine the very basics of how they deliver care in order to protect staff and patients from a highly contagious disease.
Of course, radical reinvention is nothing new for healthcare. Over the past decade, change has been constant for an industry that has adopted digital tools at lightspeed while dramatically overhauling the way trillions of dollars move through the system.
Even something as seemingly fundamental as patient privacy has evolved alongside the digital transformation. As patient data moves out of filing cabinets and onto cloud servers, a new regulatory framework is emerging to keep data secure while encouraging organizations to share information appropriately with patients and peers.
Earlier in 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) took a major step toward realigning the patient data access environment by releasing a landmark set of final rules about information blocking and public data sharing accountability.
While these rules were designed in a pre-pandemic world, they may have equally important implications for the new demands of public health, including disease reporting and social contract tracing.
The effectiveness of the new regulations–and the success of the nation’s simultaneous efforts to combat COVID-19–will depend on how well individual healthcare organizations collect, govern, share, and secure their patient data.
Providers will need complete visibility into their patient populations in order to track infection patterns, provide resources to COVID-positive individuals, and report on outcomes–all while managing the heightened data accountability expectations baked into healthcare’s new patient data access framework.
By Kelly McLendon, RHIA, CHPS; Andrew Rodriguez, MSHI, CHPS, MSHI, HCISPP, C; Chris Apgar, CISSP, C|CISO; and Julia Huddleston, CIPP/US, CIPM, CCSFP
The COVID-19 public health emergency has forced privacy and security professionals in healthcare to adapt to new realities and practices for the indefinite future.
Tasks such as implementing evolving guidance from regulators like the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and applying enforcement waivers to rules like HIPAA and SAMHSA 42 CFR part 2 substance abuse rules (Part 2); safeguarding protected health information (PHI) from external sources, like contact tracing and epidemiological reporting; and safely scaling up alternative care technologies like telehealth have been added to the already-full plates of privacy and security professionals.
All the while, bad actors continue to probe for vulnerabilities in the digital ecosystems of hospitals and health systems. Vigilance and the need for effective cybersecurity controls has only increased with the disruption wrought by the pandemic.
15 de agosto de 2020.
Enlaces para el registro de las educativas:
Estándares de Cumplimiento Para la Acreditación en el Departamento de Información de Salud
Myriam Troche, MBA, CLHGB, RHIA
10:00-11:00 a.m.
EDUCATIVA 1: www.eventleaf.com/sesioneducativa001
Del Escrito al Código: Tipos de Infarto al Miocardio
Kermith Silva, RHIA
11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
EDUCATIVA 2: www.eventleaf.com/sesioneducativa002
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