Patient Confidentiality

Confidentiality and making patients feel confident in giving us their information. Confidentiality is taken advantage of every day by healthcare professionals. HIPAA states that healthcare professionals should not give information such as date of birth, patient name, or social security number. What about talking to your significant other or best friend about a patient you examined today with an ominous skin malady? You apprehend it every day in the healthcare field. Nurses talking to one another about a patient’s health. This is a breach of HIPAA criteria under the protected health information or PHI. Even if the patient’s name was not stated, the patient’s mental or physical state was told out of confidentiality to another person. This circumstance
With today’s technology, it has become increasingly simple to input patient data. With simplicity for the good, comes the simplicity for the bad. It is also a lot easier to obtain someone else’s identity as well. Patient information is of high value and should have every precaution taken to prevent it from becoming public. Unfortunately, precautions are considering too much work and people cut corners. Why take the time to sit down and email information over to a provider when you can simply text the provider? This one corner could be the chance a hacker is waiting for. Instead of sending patient information over a secure email, you send it over an unsecure cell phone. Patients have become wary of giving information such as their social security number for these lack of privacy reasons. A member can call a call center and speak to a random representative whom they’ve never heard and the representative asks for their social security number or to either verify the social security number. The member will then wonder why a stranger needs this information to access healthcare information. Even after being explained that the social security number is just a precaution to make sure it really is the member who is calling, the member could still feel confused and frustrated. What if someone else has received access to this member’s name and social security number? Does that really verify if that is the member? No. The privacy of patient information needs to be more secure and taken more seriously. If you witness someone breaking patient privacy, then you should report it immediately. Healthcare systems today are too focused on how fast things can get done, rather than taking the time to protect extremely important information (American Hospital Association, 2006). Stop and think, if this were my information how would I want it to be handled? Treat every patient as if it were you being treated by someone else. Changing the