CONFIDENTIALITY BREACH

1.0 Background (Scenario): An employee obtained confidential patient information from the hospital medical records and used this information to visit a former female patient at her home. This was done without invitation. The employee was a male nurse at a public hospital. There was no work related reasons that the employee had for visiting the patient. The employee was subsequently dismissed from employment.

2.0 Introduction

A breach of confidentiality can take place when the confidential information pertaining to patient details are disclosed to a third person without consent. The disclosure or misuse of the private information from hospital should be prevented. One of the fascinating methods for the improvement of quality with marginal expenses of the patient care is by digitizing the healthcare workflows and their day to day activities. Electronic patient care records serve a basis for improving the quality of patient care with marginal expenses. The records contain confidential information and are considered as electronic Protected Health Information. The confidential information as an electronic format can pose risk in terms of susceptibility for theft compared to paper-based documents. There exist a risk for protection and privacy for the confidential information.

The tendency would increase with growing of healthcare industry and increasing the number of clinicians; wireless network system (Ortiz & Clancy, 2003); sharing of health information; cloud computing and the use of Patient Health Records. Due to overgrowth of healthcare organization, it would be difficult that the threats associated with malware and security threats. The protection of patient information has to be done in terms of privacy. However it is the challenge to the healthcare system to implement the adequate measures of protection and polices with limited budget (Vest & Gamm, 2010).