After the new Health Information Technology Act (HITECH) of 2009 went into effect, the electronic health record (EHR) became the largest application of big data in the healthcare industry. The HITECH act in the U.S. have been the reason why 80% of acute care hospitals that uses the EHR are certified (Ross, 2014, p. 97). The one benefit of the EHR program is the ability of the platform to absorb large amounts of data such as a patient demographics, medical history, allergies and laboratories values. This makes it easy for clinicians to improve patient quality of care by tracking progress and identifying potential problems early in their medical history. If a clinician attempts to order norco for pain, the EHR will display a best practice advisory (BPA) alert and flag the patient codeine allergy; this will redirect the clinician to considering another pain medication that would not put the patient at risk for an adverse drug reaction. Adverse drug events are estimated to occur in 30% or more of hospital stays and cost billions of dollars (Ross, 2014, p. 98). This is a great benefit big data have provided in the development of the EHR program.
The major challenge with EHR is keeping patient health information safe by preventing access to unauthorized individuals. At my facility, the IT department have assigned employee education modules on cyber-attacks. For example, an employee received an email from an IT associate about a Hospital EHR update and upon request, gave their login name and password. Shortly after the information was given, the cyber attacker was able to login into the EHR, steal approximately 50 patient’s information and changed all the employee direct deposit bank accounts to an off shore financial institution in the Caribbean. Luckily, the IT department was notified immediately and was able to prevent the massive transfer of money, but was not successful in protecting the patient’s healthcare data.
After this sentinel event, all employees are quarterly required to take education modules on the best practices to mitigate the challenges of a cyber-attack. It is important to never give your password out and to always encrypt your emails. The new tiger connect system at my facility have features to encrypt your passwords and email before sending a message. In order to hold employees accountable, leadership have started to audit employees to ensure their following the safety protocols. Sometimes fake emails will be sent out to employees to ensure everybody understand there is never a right time to give their login information and the IT associates will never ask for this information.
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