But they also have to avoid even inadvertent HIPAA violations when it comes to that data. The Privacy Rule defines Protected Health Information (PHI) broadly as “any information held by a covered entity which concerns health status, provision of healthcare, or payment for healthcare that can be linked to an individual.” The rule sets stiff penalties for compromising patient confidentiality - such as through a data breach or careless storage and handling that leaves patient data exposed, even if confidentiality isn’t compromised.Įvery medical practice - from metropolitan hospitals to rural clinics and physicians in independent practice - relies on medical data to guide patient care (and to bill health insurance companies). Department of Health and Human Services to write a Privacy Rule governing medical data collection, storage, and sharing. Among the many mandates in the law was a directive for the U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ( HIPAA) into law on August 21, 1996. While the dream is to make all relevant information available to all professionals treating a patient, that dream has to function within the reality of stringent data protection mandates. These same concerns exist for medical data systems. Since the beginning of the internet, people have been as concerned about data privacy as they’ve been enthusiastic about data access. Congress passed stimulus legislation, which included $30 billion to promote digital medical records, and the impact was dramatic.Īccording to a report by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the percentage of acute care hospitals using electronic health records increased from 9.4 percent in 2008 to 83.8 percent in 2015. When President Barack Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation was mired in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Oddly enough, the Great Recession changed the fortunes of the initiative. He gave the National Coordinator a mandate to promote the development and adoption of advanced information technology in health care, but that huge mandate came with a tiny budget.Īnd tiny budgets usually limit progress, which is exactly what happened for years - by 2008, just over 9 percent of U.S. Bush took the first step forward when he established the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in 2004. It would be a monumental task, but everyone saw the potential benefits - physicians treating a patient could access electronic health records, which would vastly improve their ability to coordinate patient care and ultimately improve patient outcomes. With each advancement in data technology, the medical field showed more interest in switching from paper files to digital medical records. The shortcomings of paper medical records became pretty obvious in the 1990s as doctors started routinely using diagnostic imaging, a move that rapidly increased the sheer volume of data. And those procedures generate far more medical data than any clipboard can hold. If you watch a contemporary TV show set in a hospital (or if you have the misfortune of needing treatment at the ER), you’ll see physicians ordering batteries of diagnostic tests and medical imaging while attaching heart rate and blood pressure monitors to a patient. Keeping a record of treatment on paper was possible when a physician’s primary diagnostic tools were limited to stethoscopes, thermometers, X-ray machines, and rudimentary blood tests. Real hospital records back then weren’t much longer. Those few pages were that fictional patient’s hospital records. You’ll also see a doctor on his rounds (doctors were invariably male then), dramatically flipping through two or three pages on the clipboard to update himself on the patient’s condition. Watch a really old episode of General Hospital, which first aired in 1963, and you’ll quickly see (besides very familiar plot lines) a clipboard hanging on a hook at the foot of every hospital bed. But a lot about data collection has changed - the amount of it, the electronic health record (EHR) systems required to collect and manage it, and the constant vigilance necessary to comply with strict patient confidentiality laws. Doctors have always recognized why data collection is so important in healthcare.
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