Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Protected Health Information (PHI), and requirements for privacy and confidentiality in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have become critical issues and a requirement of deep knowledge from the healthcare professionals using them since 1996 (DeNisco & Barker, 2019). “To protect the privacy and security of health information, two sets of federal regulations were implemented (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2022).” With the HIPAA privacy rule, patients are able to expect that healthcare professionals are maintain strict privacy and limit the use and knowledge of their private health information to only people that are part of the treating team. With the Security Rule, the healthcare provider treating the are required to protect their patients’ private health information from inappropriate use or exposure, preserve the integrity of the knowledge, and guarantee its availability (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2022). Ethical and legal concerns are easy to come by when a healthcare team member unintentionally or intentionally share this PHI when they are not supposed to. In nursing one ethical issues that we are held to is autonomy, which could be compromised if the patients PHI is shared to someone not involved in the care and without their consent or understanding (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2022). Legal concerns could be many with HIPAA and PHI on EHRs, but a breach in either of these could mean fines or even jail time, as they are considered very serious offenses (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2022). Measures that I can take in my own practice to protect patient confidentiality is simple: 1) When walking away from the computer, make sure my screen is logged off, so no one can see information that is not intended for them, 2) Never share my password with another individual, 3) Never share private medical information with a caregiver who is not directly involved in the patients care, 4) When sending secure patient information over email, use least amount of identifying patient information possible, such as MRN, and use the secure email functions and identifiers.
DeNisco, S. M., & Barker, A. M. (2019). Advanced practice nursing: Essential knowledge for the profession (4th ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. ISBN-13: 9781284072570
McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. G. (2022). Nursing Informatics and the foundation of knowledge. Jones & Bartlett Learning.