Medical records integrity involves the accuracy of all complete health records. A medical assistant should, therefore, ensure that patient’s medical records are well safeguarded to reflect an accurate picture of the patient’s health conditions either at admission or as it changes over time. Therefore, a medical assistant should adopt the below techniques to protect medical records integrity.
First, a medical assistant may adopt administrative safeguards which include enforcing policies for storage and retention of electronic data, maintaining backup systems of all stored data, adhering to specific techniques when responding to security issues and taking disciplinary actions against those who violate policies and procedures established to ensure medical records integrity. Secondly, a medical assistant may use authentication techniques to ensure data integrity. In this case, a medical assistant should ensure that those accessing computer systems are identified, and such can be accomplished by use of login passwords, biometrics, and digital certificates to ensure that only the authorized personnel’s can gain access to the system.
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Further, a medical assistant should ensure that the Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) is available at all time and that a qualified system administrator is in charge of the system to guard against various threats. The system administrator, in this case, should incorporate defensive mechanisms against hackers and viruses while also providing physical safety of the servers. In addition, a medical assistant should ensure that data integrity is maintained during transfer of data. In this case, data integrity may be maintained by using methods such as message digest so as to detect any alteration of the data and intrusion detection especially the tripwire. Data encryption may also be used in this case so that even if the data is physically obtained, it cannot be read.
