The 104 th US Congress endorsed Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA). It involves three areas of concern; administrative- measures which ensures that only authorized parties have access to the patients' data; Physical-that aims at preventing the theft or loss of the physical devices containing electronic patient information and details; and technical- being the measures that protect data loss or breach with unauthorized individuals by the use of technology that solves the data loss (Klich-Heartt & Prion, 2010). Wrong usage of social media by nurses and other healthcare practitioners by sharing patient's information can violate their code of conduct.
Patient's information should be handled strictly by authorized individuals. Sharing of this information or documents by nurses on social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace breaches their code of conduct. This violates a fundamental medical ethics principle of confidentiality. Posting such content should not be taken lightly (McKnight & Franko, 2016). Once such an individual is identified, even if a pseudo account was used, the employer should take action for potential breach of the code of conduct against the employee. Employees should be careful about what they are sharing on social media. A significant number of individuals share information or specific details just to create awareness, thus, making sure that what they share is not breaching the confidentiality of the patient.
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Notably, to protect patients' confidentiality, nurses should learn and understand the limits for using social media appropriately and identify the importance of privacy in healthcare and general medicine. The nurse should safeguard patients' information learned during treatment and should only be disclosed with the approval of patient when officially needed or during referrals to other healthcare practitioners. Employer's policies rarely educate the nurses on the proper use of social media in discussing workplace concerns outside the workplace or by use of individually owned electronics (Ventola, 2014). With this context, nurses face a severe consequence for the improper usage of social media. To sum up, nurses ought to be educated on the dangers of breaching HIPAA on social media.
References
Klich-Heartt, E. I., & Prion, S. (2010). Social networking and HIPAA: Ethical concerns for nurses. Nurse Leader , 8 (2), 56-58.
McKnight, R., & Franko, O. (2016). HIPAA compliance with mobile devices among ACGME programs. Journal of medical systems , 40 (5), 129.
Ventola, C. L. (2014). Social media and health care professionals: benefits, risks, and best practices. Pharmacy and Therapeutics , 39 (7), 491.
