Health Informatics Assignment: Patient Health Records and EHRs

This assignment delves into the realm of health informatics, specifically focusing on the usability benefits and challenges associated with personal health records (PHRs) and patient portals. It addresses the advantages of patient portals, such as improved patient-provider communication and easy access to health data, while also highlighting the critical concern of data security and potential breaches by hackers. The assignment explores accessibility and usability issues within health informatics applications, emphasizing the need for robust security safeguards like password protection and data encryption. Furthermore, it examines how PHRs and patient portals facilitate patient education, transparency, and inclusion in healthcare, while also acknowledging potential limitations in patient access to comprehensive electronic health records (EHRs) and medication information. The student references several academic sources to support their arguments.

Running head: HEALTH INFORMATICS
Health informatics
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

1HEALTH INFORMATICS
Table of Contents
Question 1: 2
Question 2: 2
Question 3: 2
Question 4: 3
References: 4

2HEALTH INFORMATICS
Question 1:
Personal health records has emerged as one of the greatest usability benefit for the patents to
have an easy and secure access to the health care that the patient is obtaining. There are both pros
and cons of the patient portal systems; it provides better communication with the patients,
provides equal and easy access to the patient regarding their health care data. The only con of the
patient portals are the concern for the data security which can be easily breached by potential
hackers (Archer et al., 2011).
Question 2:
The accessibility and usability issues are a national concern in case health informatics
application and patient portals (Hebda & Czar, 2013). It has to be mentioned in this context that
the easy access for the patients to their own personal health care data can be easily breached by
the hackers. Hence there is need for security safeguards being placed (Li et al., 2010). The
control access tools like password and PIN numbers can serve as most effective security
safeguards for the personal health records. Another very important security safeguard is
encrypting of the stored information.
Question 3:
It has to be understood that personal health records and the related patents portals provide the
opportunity for the health care providers with the opportunity to shat eth health care related data
with the patients in the most user friendly and activated procedure. It helps the patients to have a
clear regarding the health and the care procedure that they are receiving, and also track their own
progress. The patient portal system enhances transparency in the health care system. The security

3HEALTH INFORMATICS
safeguards in place for the PHRs like the control access tools and encrypting keys help in
protecting the data being shared by the health care authority (Reti et al., 2010). Hence, I agree
that this provides a excellent framework for enhancing patient education and inclusion in the
health care industry.
Question 4:
For patients will not be able to access all of the EHRs at all points will not be able to
understand the exact state of the patient in case of any chronic prolonged illness (Woods et al.,
2013). The patients will not be able to understand what medications are being administered and
in what concentrations, which can be harmful for patients with hypersensitivity or allergy.

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References:
Archer, N., Fevrier-Thomas, U., Lokker, C., McKibbon, K. A., & Straus, S. E. (2011). Personal
health records: a scoping review. Journal of the American Medical Informatics
Association, 18(4), 515-522.
Hebda, T., & Czar, P. (2013). Handbook of informatics for nurses & healthcare professionals
(5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
Li, M., Yu, S., Ren, K., & Lou, W. (2010, September). Securing personal health records in cloud
computing: Patient-centric and fine-grained data access control in multi-owner settings.
In International conference on security and privacy in communication systems (pp. 89-
106). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Reti, S. R., Feldman, H. J., Ross, S. E., & Safran, C. (2010). Improving personal health records
for patient-centered care. Journal of the American Medical Informatics
Association, 17(2), 192-195.
Woods, S. S., Schwartz, E., Tuepker, A., Press, N. A., Nazi, K. M., Turvey, C. L., & Nichol, W.
P. (2013). Patient experiences with full electronic access to health records and clinical
notes through the My HealtheVet Personal Health Record Pilot: qualitative
study. Journal of medical Internet research, 15(3).