Redaction to Anonymize Electronic Records
Redaction is an automated technological advancement in which each piece of personally identified information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) is removed from the record of a patient. The process usually is supposed to yield 100% accuracy at all times (Tierney et al., 2015). In this way, healthcare organizations can stick to the privacy compliance rules of HIPAA. In order to identify the amount of information that should be redacted from an electronic record, it is imperative to explore the amount of information that the third party organizations demand. Despite the amount of information, it is significant to understand that sensitive information that reveals the identity of the patient should be redacted at all times. Such information includes the name of the patient, address details and the UR number (Leventhal et al., 2015). The above-listed information is the only sensitive data that the HIPAA highlights as necessary to be protected. In this way, this redacted information does not affect research conducted to enhance healthcare outcomes for patients especially when done by third parties such as health research institutes. Some of the other sensitive information that the HIPAA of 1996 advocates that should be blacked out include the employers, the birth rate and household members (Leventhal et al., 2015). In this case, the information identified to fall in this category should be the one that does provide a reasonable basis for the identification of the patient.
Name Redaction from an EHR
Redacting the name of the patient from an electronic health record is not enough. Redacting only a name from an electronic record of a patient is part of the steps healthcare organizations need to take in order to HIPAA compliance rules. Therefore for any healthcare institution that decides to redact only the names of patients from their personal healthcare records, it is apparent that the hospital will be in violation of the HIPAA compliance rules.
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Name and Address Redaction from an EHR
It is apparent that the redaction of data from electronic records is one of the most sensitive processes that healthcare professionals employ in securing patient data and safety especially when releasing it to third parties. However, one aspect of the redaction process should be taken into consideration: the need to identify the data that should be redacted. In this case, a healthcare center that removes the name and the address from the PHI and PII does to comply fully with the redaction process the when anonymizing electronic records (Leventhal et al., 2015). The anonymity of the electronic records when released to third parties should comply with the HIPAA safety and privacy concerns raised herein. Therefore, the hospital management is obligated to include the name, address details, and the UR number to preserve the confidentiality of the patient.
It is true that medical records are like fingerprints. The amount of information that healthcare professionals demand to be included in the electronic records is enough to trace and identify the patient without his or her physical presence. Such an instance was noted in the Australian government releasing anonymized data to the public. However, research by the University of Melbourne students indicated that the information remaining in the records would be used successfully to re-identify the people including learning about their medical history without their consent. The case herein is an example that portrays that governments and institutions use fingerprints to identify people. In this case, the electronic records have all information that one requires to identify people especially patients and they are comparable to fingerprints.
References
Leventhal, J. C., Cummins, J. A., Schwartz, P. H., Martin, D. K., & Tierney, W. M. (2015). Designing a system for patients controlling providers’ access to their electronic health records: organizational and technical challenges. Journal of general internal medicine , 30 (1), 17-24.
Tierney, W. M., Alpert, S. A., Byrket, A., Caine, K., Leventhal, J. C., Meslin, E. M., & Schwartz, P. H. (2015). Provider responses to patients controlling access to their electronic health records: a prospective cohort study in primary care. Journal of general internal medicine , 30 (1), 31-37.
