Database Security within Health Sector

This article discusses the importance of database security within the health sector, including the use of electronic health records (EHRs) and measures that healthcare providers can take to protect patient data.

Running head: DATABASE SECURITY WITHIN HEALTH SECTOR
Database Security within Health Sector
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s note

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An electronic health record (EHR) is a form of the digital version of the paper-based
chart of the patient. These form of the documents are based on real-time, which helps in the
easy availability of the records of the patients. The EHR systems form an integral part of the
health IT (Weiskopf & Weng, 2013). The essential programs help in providing financially
based incentives for different service providers for the adoption of the HER related
technology.
The EHR technology is the main centre of focus of the effort of the federal
government for the various institutions of healthcare to share medical based data. The
technology would include the clinical and medical information, demographic data, pharmacy
and radiology data.
There are many advantages of the EHR systems that are meant for the patients and the
medical providers. The EHR technology helps in offering fast access to the records of the
patients and full information of the checkup details of the patient (Rodrigues et al., 2013).
This technology would also be an aid for reducing the various costs of the checkup, the
paperwork and thus improving the efficiency of work. They help in enabling a better level of
the prescription for the patients and thus would help in reducing the medical errors. The
feature of interoperability within the technology of EHR would also allow the EHR systems
to communicate and for the exchange of the data. They can also make use of the shared
information (Koppel & Lehmann, 2014). As the EHR systems might capture the vital data
from the patients, it would be difficult to share the same information with any another kind of
system.
The Health Information Technology based on the Economic and Clinical Health
Act or the HITECH Act is one of the section of the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2009 (Mennemeyer et al., 2016). This technology has helped in establishing

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financially based incentives and several penalties to constrain the providers for developing
themselves as certified users of the EHR technology. The providers of healthcare should
make use of the EHR systems that would comply with the HHS standards. The privacy rule
of the HIPAA helps in providing federal based protections that are held by different covered
entities and would provide them with a variety of rights (Chowdhury et al., 2013).
The case study is based on the theft of the personal medical records and the files
related to the patients of a particular physician. These data are extremely crucial for the
physician as well as the physician. The providers of healthcare should enable better
protection for the privacy of the patient. The health care providers should follow the best
level of practices to ensure that the computer networks have the best practices of security.
The use of secure protocols for security, antivirus based programming, password protection
and firewalls are very much essential to secure the vital medical records.
There are specific steps, which would be essential by the physician to secure the vital
systems. These steps should comply with the HITECH and HIPAA Acts. The measures
include:
1. The first step consists of the installation and the enabling of the encryption
technology.
2. The second provides for the use of a password or any other process that would
include the authentication of the user.
3. The third step directs the user to install and thus activate the process of wiping or
remote disabling to erase vital data from the stolen or lost devices.
4. This step would direct the user to disable and not install any form of file-sharing
based applications.

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5. The installation and enabling of a firewall to block unauthorised access to the
systems.
6. This step helps in the process of installation and thus allowing the software to for
the security to protect the systems against various kind of spyware, malware-based attacks,
viruses and other kinds of malicious applications.
7. The software for the protection should be updated at regular intervals, and the
mobile applications should be adequately researched before the process of downloading.
8. There should be proper maintenance over the physical control of the several
devices. There should also be an appropriate level of security to send or receive health-based
information over various Wi-Fi networks (Hassanalieragh et al., 2015).
9. The final step includes the deletion of the stored data of the health records from the
different mobile devices before the disbarment of the tools.
From the above discussion, it could be concluded that the EHR systems are incredibly
crucial for securing the essential medical records of the patients. The breaches to the security
of the data and medical based theft of identity are an increasing concern among the various
hospitals. The EHRs could be helpful in exposing potential based problems on safety thus
this would help the providers to avoid severe problems for the patients. Hence this would lead
to better outcomes for the patients.

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References
Weiskopf, N. G., & Weng, C. (2013). Methods and dimensions of electronic health record
data quality assessment: enabling reuse for clinical research. Journal of the American
Medical Informatics Association, 20(1), 144-151.
Rodrigues, J. J., De La Torre, I., Fernández, G., & López-Coronado, M. (2013). Analysis of
the security and privacy requirements of cloud-based electronic health records
systems. Journal of medical Internet research, 15(8).
Koppel, R., & Lehmann, C. U. (2014). Implications of an emerging EHR monoculture for
hospitals and healthcare systems. Journal of the American Medical Informatics
Association, 22(2), 465-471.
Mennemeyer, S. T., Menachemi, N., Rahurkar, S., & Ford, E. W. (2016). Impact of the
HITECH act on physicians’ adoption of electronic health records. Journal of the
American Medical Informatics Association, 23(2), 375-379.
Chowdhury, O., Gampe, A., Niu, J., von Ronne, J., Bennatt, J., Datta, A., ... & Winsborough,
W. H. (2013, June). Privacy promises that can be kept: a policy analysis method with
application to the HIPAA privacy rule. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM symposium
on Access control models and technologies (pp. 3-14). ACM.
Hassanalieragh, M., Page, A., Soyata, T., Sharma, G., Aktas, M., Mateos, G., ... &
Andreescu, S. (2015, June). Health monitoring and management using Internet-of-
Things (IoT) sensing with cloud-based processing: Opportunities and challenges.
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