Electronic Health Records (EHR) are a double-edged sword. Although the technology allows the collection and storage of patient data electronically, it is highly vulnerable to a security breach. Therefore, patients worry about the security of their private information. Ms. Suzy Smith is suing ABC hospital for a data breach that occurred when the hospital sent her regular physician a chart to his email address, which was hacked, without her consent. The hospital is liable for the data breach because it did not take reasonable measures to ensure that the chart was only accessible to the targeted physician; thus, it should compensate Ms. Suzy.
ABC Hospital has a legal liability over the security of Ms. Suzy’s medical chart. EHR is a legal document used by the hospital to record patient information, and the institution has a responsibility to protect the data (Brodnik, 2017). The EHR data can be shared with people who have authorized access to the records, such as physicians (Ozair et al., 2015). Therefore, the hospital did not need Ms. Suzy’s informed consent to create and send a copy of her chart to the doctor. However, the hospital should have taken reasonable precautions to safeguard private health information from unauthorized parties, such as hackers (Wallace, 2015). Since the hospital failed to adopt more significant defenses in the email communication, it violates the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The hospital can prevent the breach by sending encrypted emails to physicians; thus, the information will be unreadable to unauthorized individuals. From a personal perspective, the hacking of Ms. Suzy’s EHR is a data breach. Therefore, Ms. Suzy should be compensated for the hospital’s negligence in the management of her EHR.
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References
Ozair, F. F., Jamshed, N., Sharma, A., & Aggarwal, P. (2015). Ethical issues in electronic health records: A general overview. Perspectives in Clinical Research , 6 (2), 73.
Brodnik, M. S (2017). Fundamentals of law for health informatics and information management . AHIMA Press.
Wallace, I. M. (2015). Is patient confidentiality compromised with the electronic health record?: a position paper. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing , 33 (2), 58-62.
