Jun 19, 2014

Guest column by Dave Vreeland, a partner at Cumberland Consulting Group in Cool Springs

A digital revolution is underway in health care. Since the passage of the HITECH Act in 2009, the U.S. health care industry has dramatically expanded the use of technology, including the adoption of electronic medical record solutions. In addition, the Affordable Care Act introduced a shift in the way providers are paid from fee-for-service toward value-based payment models. These financial incentives have helped spur much of the digitization and automation occurring in the industry today and will likely drive further automation and the increased use of interactive tools.

With the implementation of new technology solutions in health care, the amount of patient data available in digital form is increasing quickly and protecting patient information is more important than ever. Among the federal policies and regulations in place to help protect patient privacy are HIPAA’s Privacy and Security Rules, which provide guidelines to ensure appropriate protection of electronic health information, including access control, audit controls and transmission security. The importance of confidentiality and data security in health care cannot be overstated.

It’s been hard to miss the many headlines related to data security and privacy in the last year or so. It seems like every week we hear another horror story about a security breach in which hackers accessed the personal information of millions of customers. Over the 2013 holiday season, the Target credit card data breach affected a staggering 70 million customers. Security breaches like these coupled with NSA global surveillance disclosures leaked by Edward Snowden can make us feel like we are living in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.

Still, we continue to generate and share an unprecedented amount of digital information. At a tech conference in 2010, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said we now create as much information every two days — about five exabytes of data — as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. Interestingly, the real driver of that volume today is user-generated data such as tweets and texts sent, posts liked, videos watched, websites created, apps downloaded, photos uploaded and Google searches performed.

So why do we keep creating and sharing content online when we are aware of the security and privacy risks? The reality of the modern age is that, unless we want to live an inconvenient daily existence, we accept the risk of sharing our personal information digitally on thousands of websites, social media channels and databases around the world.

But what does that mean for health information and medical records? Now that we are generating a high volume of electronic data like never before, what do we do with it and how do we protect it?

Read the full guest column on the Nashville Post’s website.

Filed under: In The News