Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, participated in an excellent interview. He gave insight into:
- EHR technologies
- Where the Meaningful Use program is headed
- EHR interoperability
- The future of Regional Extension Centers
It was a very good interview and I urge everyone to read it.
He concluded the interview by looking at protecting patient information.
One last thing I want to talk about is, we talked about safety issues, I think we should also always have on top of mind is around security of patient information. I think healthcare really needs to wake up to the need for them to meet their patients’ expectations that healthcare providers really do everything they need to do to keep that patient information private and secure. So many of the breaches we see, the failure to encrypt laptops and give data to business associates without having the assurances in terms of how they’re going to treat it … it just shows a lack of attention.
I think that’s changing. I think there’s a lot of education that can be done. I think there’s more we can do with the vendors to make them default settings and strengthen and harden our systems. More than anything, we have to always keep the security of patient information at top of mind and not relegate it to an also-ran, or after all the other issues are taken care of then we’ll see if we can do something about security. We really can’t. We’ve got to build it in.
Dr Mostashari hits on a very good point. A lot of the patient data breaches we are seeing are due to the lack of knowledge on properly protecting patient data. Download our 5 simple and inexpensive tips to protect patient information. It will help you understand what you should do to properly secure patient information and how surprisingly inexpensive it can be.
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