Use of personal devices and social media in healthcare
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Use of personal devices and social media in healthcare
Technological advances have enabled massive transformations in the field of healthcare that have streamlined the provision of services to the clientele. For instance, the use of wearable devices attached to personal devices such as personal computers and phones has brought a new dimension of telemonitoring to the scope of healthcare. Additionally, social forums such as twitter and consultative sites have engaged many patients in a bid to provide up to date diagnoses on the conditions ailing them. However, these new forms of communication between clients and healthcare professionals are riddled with legal and privacy concerns in the case of breach of ethics. These predicaments form the basis of this paper that seeks to discuss HIPAA, legal, and regulatory standards, scenarios ending recommendations, advantages, and disadvantages of personal devices of social media in healthcare.
HIPAA, Legal, and Regulatory Discussion
The health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA) of 1996 act primarily to modernize the relay of personal healthcare data and denotes its protection from theft and disclosure. Drolet et al. (2017) posit that the use of electronic information encoded by personal devices must be protected as stipulated by HIPAA regulations. In the excerpt, the author outlines that HIPAA denotes that the transfer and storage of healthcare information should occur in means that protect it from unauthorized access. Chernyshev, Zeadally, & Baig (2019) outline that healthcare data breaches the world over has legal implications to the concerned organization and individuals. In the united states alone, there have been healthcare data breaches famously the banner healthcare hacking that led to the disclosure of records of over 3.62 million individuals.
Glueckauf et al. (2018) outline that the American Telemedicine Association clearly defines the usage of telemonitoring during the transfer of information in healthcare organizations. In the excerpt, the authors denote that all telemonitoring activity should adhere to privacy and confidentiality standards. The American telemedicine association regulates Telemonitoring, being a service that depends on personal devices to relay data to healthcare organizations for analysis. Therefore, the concerned organization must ensure the security of systems to ensure that data breaches do not occur. Following, data breaches the data mined is oft nut on social media sites; a classic example is a case where California’s first lady Maria Shrivia’s health data was leaked in social media platforms. The breach was because of the interception of communication between various health systems that had her information.
Scenario Ending and Recommendations
Steward & Cavazos (2019) posit that the AMCA data breach affected more than 25 million patients on August 1st, 2018, to march 30th 2019. The organization faced 8 data breaches that resulted in multiple exposures of patient data. In the investigations to determine the extent of the breach, additional threats were identified, bringing more entities into the inquiries. Some of the entities include Penobscot, Bio reference, Quest, and Labcoorp. The involved company, America Medical Collection Agency, filed for bankruptcy as the other associated entities facing multiple lawsuits that reduced their financial capabilities. On average, the interested companies faced various mitigations and dipping of revenues due to the stance taken to cover up the cases of data breaches.
In more than 13 months, the company faced eight data hacks, which put a toll on the healthcare provider. However, the decision of the company to decline disclosure to the affected patients sparked a lot of rage from the consumers of the services. The data hack, which happened through suspicious access of emails sent to an employee through a personal device, placed the security of the systems in jeopardy. In the beginning month, the health service providers chose to decline and dispel any concerns that the consumers were raising on the data breaches. The action acted as a means of salvaging the image of the company though in futility. However, these actions were not conditional in light of the predicaments facing the company.
Following the initial data breach, the healthcare service provider should have instituted measures of disclosing the breach to its consumers. This action would have gone a long way in building trust between the service provider and the customer. Moreover, there should have been a mitigation plan that involved compensation of the individual affected by the initial attack. A settlement from the initial breach would have deterred the consumers from seeking legal redress from the data breach. Additionally, it would have been essential to collaborate with other regulators and companies such as Google which would have deleted the patient data from its serves and searches as in the case of university of Washington data breach (Ahmed & Ullah 2017)
The impacts of a data breach are always immense on the patient as well as the concerned individual. In as much as the violations occur in an unprecedented manner, all healthcare provider organizations should strive to ensure that the situation is not repeated. For instance, in the case of AMCA, outsourcing of system protection should have occurred to alleviate the seven repeated consequent attacks. More so, in the event of the attack, the health service provider would have ensured that the consumer data access is retrieved from all social media sites and internet searches, a situation replicated in the UW data hack.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Technology, in many instances, positively influences the healthcare industry with a focus on the production of positive outcomes. However, technology contains a share of its predicaments that impede a smooth flow of services to the respective consumers. Easier access is one of the main advantages of the utilization of technology in the healthcare sector. As opposed to traditional hard copy data storage where a simple data search includes rigorous physical perusing of extraneous amounts of files, the use of health systems always involves a single click. Additionally, the usage of technology offers flexibility in that through telemonitoring; patients can transmit vitals through wearable devices connected to personal devices (Wood, Boulanger, & Padwal, 2017). In this form of technology, the patient can perform tasks of daily living without fear of complications that would go unnoticed.
However, despite the immense advantages, usage of technology also puts data security at risk from malicious ransomware and data hacking activities. The data security challenges affecting the service providers pose them at risk of ransoms and legal mitigations that cripple the financial outlook of the specified companies (Hammouchi et al. 2019). Additionally, usage of technology also brings data errors that cause misdiagnoses that are detrimental to the health of the patients seeking healthcare services. Mane et al. (2018) outline that misdiagnoses related to data errors are prevalent in situations whereby inconsistency in data description disfigures the medical histories resulting in inappropriate interventions. However, these cases are on a decline due to increased awareness of health data security and layered authorization protocols.
Conclusion
Technology in healthcare offers many advantages such as more convenient access to the information as well as remote access to the patients’ vitals. However, despite remarkable data and logistical advantages, hacking and unauthorized access poses an excellent risk to various health service providers. Per HIPAA that necessitates protection of patient data, legal implications present in hacking cases are enough to cripple most service providers through court cases, and compensation.
References
Ahmed, M., & Ullah, A. S. B. (2017, August). False data injection attacks in healthcare. In Australasian Conference on Data Mining (pp. 192-202). Springer, Singapore.
Chernyshev, M., Zeadally, S., & Baig, Z. (2019). Healthcare data breaches: Implications for digital forensic readiness. Journal of medical systems, 43(1), 7.
Drolet, B. C., Marwaha, J. S., Hyatt, B., Blazar, P. E., & Lifchez, S. D. (2017). Electronic communication of protected health information: privacy, security, and HIPAA compliance. The Journal of hand surgery, 42(6), 411-416.
Glueckauf, R. L., Maheu, M. M., Drude, K. P., Wells, B. A., Wang, Y., Gustafson, D. J., & Nelson, E. L. (2018). Survey of psychologists’ telebehavioral health practices: Technology use, ethical issues, and training needs. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 49(3), 205.
Hammouchi, H., Cherqi, O., Mezzour, G., Ghogho, M., & El Koutbi, M. (2019). Digging deeper into data breaches: An exploratory data analysis of hacking breaches over time. Procedia Computer Science, 151, 1004-1009.
Mane, K. K., Rubenstein, K. B., Nassery, N., Sharp, A. L., Shamim, E. A., Sangha, N. S., … & Newman-Toker, D. E. (2018). Diagnostic performance dashboards: tracking diagnostic errors using big data. BMJ quality & safety, 27(7), 567-570.
Steward, D., & Cavazos, R. (2019). Future Challenges and Recommendations. In Big Data Analytics in US Courts (pp. 75-84). Palgrave Pivot, Cham.
Wood, P. W., Boulanger, P., & Padwal, R. S. (2017). Home blood pressure telemonitoring: rationale for use, required elements, and barriers to implementation in Canada. Canadian Journal of Cardiology, 33(5), 619-625.