NR 512 Week 6 Discussion: Health IT Topic of the Week and Impact on Practice

NR 512 Week 6 Discussion: Health IT Topic of the Week and Impact on Practice – What was the HealthIT Topic you selected related to your specialty? Why did you select it? How will this impact your practice?

NR 512 Week 6 Discussion: Health IT Topic of the Week and Impact on Practice

In my current practice setting at a rural, 300+ bed hospital, we have a number of measures to protect patient health information. Our IT department employs firewalls and maintains the security of our hospital Wifi. Audits are performed to monitor the accessing of patient charts, ensuring that they are being accessed for the correct reason and by appropriate staff. Whenever we click on a patient chart we have to either put that we are the patient’s nurse, charge nurse, or an auditor, for example. At every nurse’s station there is a shred box where we can safely dispose of excess paperwork that may have patient information on it. We also have mandatory online education to complete periodically that reviews how to keep patient information secure, appropriate actions and inappropriate actions, HIPAA guidelines, and the implications of not adhering to these rules. I think with today’s age of mass transfer of digital information the emphasis on protecting patient information cannot be enforced enough. When HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) was first initiated in 1996, the focus was mostly transferring of information from doctor to doctor, office to office, whereas now the focus over 20 years later is almost exclusively dedicated to protecting patient information (Dolan, 2014). While we live in an amazing time of electronic data capability, it comes with its own challenges with regards to safety and privacy.

NR 512 Week 6 Discussion: Health IT Topic of the Week and Impact on Practice References

Dolan, P. (2014). Protecting patient information. Ophthalmology Times, 39(10), 23-24.