Electronic Healthcare Records Management in a Public Environment
Electronic healthcare records are difficult to maintain in a public environment considering that the often contain personal or sensitive information related to an individual’s health. The evolution of IT and its deployment and adaptation in the healthcare industry has introduced data services offered by major technology firms including Google and Microsoft. These two IT companies have ventured into the healthcare market by providing EHR systems that are aimed to assist patients in adding their health information as well as generate medical knowledge for the patient.
Although, questions and inquiries arise with regards to the issue of security and privacy in implementing public cloud services like the Google Health e-PHR and the Microsoft HealthVault. As a patient I would prefer that my private health data be stored individually with each hospital or doctor’s office, requiring that data be transferred between different parties when needed. The concept behind having an in-house managed private data center is that goes the extra step to prove to the government that regulations are being followed. Public cloud systems are still at the questionable point of their capability to handle and control private patient information without compromising the security of the data itself (Shoniregun, Dube & Mtenzi, 2010).
Big hospitals have adapted to managing their EHR systems with the help of an integrated IT department, thus, subsequently shouldering the risk themselves through enforcing advanced security protocols that cloud computing service providers might not offer. Information security is critical, and when it comes to handling healthcare data, management executives are expected to be highly accountable. Therefore, healthcare managers have to maintain visibility, that is, know exactly where their data and information resides.
Using cloud services would mean that one has to consistently rely on the internet as the primary access method which can be prone to bandwidth factors depending on geographical location. On-premise networks will make it faster for on location data transfer or sharing of big files (Pahl, Xiong & Walshe, 2013). Ultimately, trust is a difficult component to quantify within the cloud. Thus, it’s adoption entirely depends on a patient, clicnicial or doctor becoming comfortable and secure with using these services.
References
Pahl, C., Xiong, H., & Walshe, R. (2013, September). A comparison of on-premise to cloud migration approaches. In European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (pp. 212-226). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Shoniregun, C. A., Dube, K., & Mtenzi, F. (2010). Electronic healthcare information security (Vol. 53). Springer Science & Business …
