Quality in Healthcare
For many years, health information privacy has been a critical issue on patient’s safety and overall health care. Health information privacy concerns well custody of patient’s health information. Notably, poorly kept health records of a patient can be obtained by unauthorized persons and be used to attack the patient in different ways including access to the patient’s bank accounts and credit cards among other concerns. Maintaining patient’s privacy is very crucial for healthcare organization. With the advanced use of technology, weak information systems can highly lead to the hacking of Electronic Health Records and hence compromising patient’s safety. The purpose of this paper is to discuss health information privacy as a major patient’s safety concern in healthcare with the aim to establish how research, PI and Evidence-Based-Practices can help to address the concern.
Health information privacy
Safeguarding patient privacy is one of the requirements of the bioethics nonmaleficence principle. Notably, leaking of personal privacy and confidentiality is harmful and affects ones dignity. Disclosure of some confidential health information to other parties including family members, insurer or employers can easily lead to discrimination, stigma or embarrassments. Patients are highly likely to hold back some crucial information to the physicians when they learn that their privacy is not guaranteed. As such, promoting health information privacy can effectively enhance communication between the patient and the doctor. Although the perceptions of privacy varies from one person to the other, it is important for the prevention from harm, discrimination, embarrassment and the overall quality of health care.
Placing high levels of health information privacy and confidentiality is important for various reasons. Firstly, privacy is a fundamental human right that has inherent value. Privacy is not only valuable in itself but is also a critical component for the wellbeing of the patients. Therefore, lack of health information privacy ignores patient’s moral uniqueness. A consensus view is that privacy has high value since it promotes and facilitates other basic human values such as the ideals of personhood. Some of these ideals include respect, individuality, dignity and personal autonomy or the ability for individuals to make good decisions. In light of this, lack of health information privacy injures the patients’ psychological health in addition to other physical damages including fraud using obtained data from Electronic Health Records or other sources.
Enhancing health information privacy through Research, PI and EBP
Both privacy protections and ethical health research are essential because they provide valuable benefits to the community. Health research is important towards improving wellbeing of individuals and overall human health. For instance, it is essential to protect patients involved in research from harm while preserving their fundamental and essential rights. As such, failure to protect patient privacy violates the concept of doing no harm because the latter is harmful to the patient in terms of social and psychological integrity and human dignity.
Evidence based practice have various benefits to the patient and the entire society. EBP allows the nurses to assess research to clearly understand the efficacy and risks of particular diagnostic tests and treatment. Implementation of EBP enables healthcare practitioners to include the patients in their healthcare plans. As such, EBP can significantly help the practitioners to address the issue of health information privacy because it demonstrates high level of confidentiality and scientific reasoning. Also, EBP enhances compliance to the HIPAA regulations as well as the HITECH act requirements. EBP demands the nurses and physicians to use high-quality information by implementing successful prevention policies and programs. The HIPAA privacy rule requires the organization to carry our regular audit trail to identify the weaknesses of the information systems before any information lands on to unauthorized persons. While engaging in evidence based practices, nurses and physicians manage privacy by careful handling of information while exercising professionalism and ethics.
While EBP enhances the patient’s information security through compliance to various regulations, research help to identify new strategies and policies for increasing privacy protection. Besides PI allows the patients to develop trust necessary for disclosure and hence quality health care. Notably, PI depicts high performances among healthcare practitioners, an element that highly makes the patient to give their opinions and suggestions concerning the areas of improvement and possible weaknesses. The latter permits effective communication that significantly contribute to correction of any existing mistakes concerning health information privacy including health information exchange mistakes, weak health systems and ignorance of simple clinical procedures.
Applicable Quality Improvement process
Quality improvement processes are the programs that evaluate the performance of an organization while determining the most appropriate procedures for improved quality of care. As such, the most applicable quality improvement process is the enhanced readiness and change competences for reduced clinical variations. While clinical variations might be essential in some areas, healthcare practitioners demonstrate unwarranted clinical variations that increase the risk of breach to healthcare information privacy. As such, reducing clinical variations through patient engagement increases trust and hence improved patient safety. The primary reason for choosing this process is because of its patient engagement level. Usually, lack of patient engagement among the nurses increase the likelihood of healthcare information breach. Therefore, changes in attitude help to improve communication amongst nurses and patients. The success of these process is evident when the patients show increased trust and level of disclosure.
Data sources and outcomes
For credible information, this document uses various data sources including enrollment forms, community needs assessments and the client satisfaction forms. It is apparent that most of the patients would be hesitant to record some of their confidential information in the enrollment forms or provide some of the community needs. Besides, the client satisfaction forms indicate the areas that the client was not satisfied and those that require high levels of improvement. For instance, a patient may suggest the implementation of Electronic Health Record to reduce delays in the retrieval of patient’s information. In most cases, delays in patient record retrieval reduces the number of patients that the nurse or physician can serve in a given time. The latter creates a negative image and poor reputation. Thus, adoption of HER increases the chances of healthy reputation.
Data gathering and dissemination
The most appropriate data capture method for this qualitative evaluation will be note taking in observation, interviews and focus groups. Note taking is a very credible method of data capture as it depicts the reality on the ground as observed by the researcher. When patients complain about a process or procedure, the researcher can easily record and give to the necessary authority. Interviews are traditional data gathering methods that provide the researcher with a platform to interrogate the desired sample population. In this regard, interviews can provide necessary information towards quality improvement and increased health information privacy. Dissemination of the captured data will be through formal reporting and other meetings.
Essential organizational culture considerations
Different characteristics of organizational culture demonstrate the organizations level of success. This work will consider an array of these essential elements. One of the most critical consideration will be the level of team work and cooperation. Often, minimal or lack of cooperation influence information breakdown or distortion. The latter can influence performance of inappropriate procedure to the patient and eventually causing harm to the patient. This factor is very essential because healthcare practitioners must observe increased patient care through teamwork. However, it is not possible to have teamwork without effective means of communication.
Another consideration will be the level of creativity and innovation. In the modern world, creativity has become the core factor of growth and development. Creativity will help to establish various ways to address challenges before they arise. Aggressiveness is also an important factor to consider as it depicts the likelihood of success in different activities.
Conclusion
This paper concludes that health information safety is one of the most challenging concerns in the modern healthcare setting. While the adoption of Electronic Health Records improve efficiency, they pose some challenges of ensuring that the patient’s health records remain safe at all times. Besides, healthcare organizations should conduct regular audit trails of the systems to establish any unwarranted traffic. Nonetheless, the adoption of evidence based practices, ethical research, QI and PI significantly addresses the challenges involving patient safety.