Digitalization of Medical Health Records & Its Privacy/Data Security Concerns: U.S. & South Korea

In fact, operating such vulnerable systems for the supposed benefits such as accuracy and efficiency have also proved to be erroneous. The case of the Veterans’ Administration’s newly-adopted EHR system reveals the tale. Contrary to expectations that entailed modernizing the medical record system, deficiencies in the system contributed to injuries and even deaths to many veterans for reasons such as records disappearing in the system and scheduling errors that prevented patients from receiving appropriate treatment. Politico.

These links are useless. You don't anchor the links to the relevant phrases in the text, as we do when writing hypertext, and you repetitively cite to the whole document , as though the reader should reread the entire document each time in order to support your point. You should fix the references so the reader can use them easily and effectively.

This draft contains a useful summary of available information. Writing about US EHR's without explaining the proprietary software ecologies for using them, and their deliberate incompatibilities, fails to explain what's important about the technology. You don't say anything about Korean EHR software either, although that's another story of immense inefficiency and corruption. You don't discuss the US Veterans' Administration health care IT system, the free software EHR it uses, and the efforts made by the software companies, the defense contractors, and even the Pentagon itself to hobble adoption of that software.

As your conclusion shows, you haven't yet developed an idea of your own about any of this, except that privacy is important and it should be protected. You discuss HIPAA briefly, but you neither show what is strong about it nor explain difficulties if you have located them. Making the next draft stronger means getting away from the "let me summarize facts about the US and Korea" to present some actual legal ideas. (Who actually cares about Korea outside Korea, and why? Why aren't you writing about health records technology and practices in one or more European societies instead?)

Paper Title: Digitalization of Medical Health Records & Its Privacy/Data Security Concerns: U.S. & South Korea

-- By MichaelSun - 07 May 2024

Introduction

United States

Firstly, HIPAA is a federal law that aims to ensure that EHRs remain private and secured from third parties. National Library of Medicine. HIPAA has three requirements: a privacy rule that gives patients rights over their PHRs and requires healthcare providers to maintain safeguards to protect the privacy of EHRs, a security rule that sets national standards for such protections, and a breach notification rule that gives patients the right to be notified of a security breach. HHS. Secondly, the HITECH Act not only provides a more rigorous enforcement mechanism for HIPAA through the provision of harsher penalties in case of violation, but also establishes financial incentives for healthcare providers to adopt EHRs. National Library of Medicine. Unsurprisingly, the HITECH Act has drastically induced the rise of EHRs from 3.2% usage in 2008 to 95% in 2017. National Library of Medicine.

Nevertheless, an increased EHR adoption rate has also prompted serious privacy and security concerns. EHRs essentially include extremely private information such as the patient’s biographical information, prescription history, immunization record, and laboratory data. National Library of Medicine. Yet as cyberattackers have become more sophisticated with the motive of financial gains, it has become more difficult to prevent them from evading security systems and from accessing patients’ private information. National Library of Medicine. For example, it was reported that cyberattackers breached into the EHR database of Community Health Systems – one of the most highly-regarded healthcare providers in the U.S. – and accessed patients’ social security numbers and credit information. National Library of Medicine. The fact that healthcare providers have increasingly adopted similar third-party operating systems for EHRs has put them more at risk of being infiltrated by malware and viruses. National Library of Medicine. In essence, not only does the rise in EHR adoption put medical organizations at risk of financial harm from unauthorized access to their databases, it also drastically increases the risk of individuals in getting their sensitive information exposed.

Korea

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Korean government decided to directly tackle the low PHR adoption and introduced the “My Healthway” project – basically a mobile app service that provides individual patients the ability to store their medical record information such as medication records, vaccination history, insurance records, and genetic data on their mobile phones. OECD. On its face, this was an appropriate standardized mechanism to promote PHR use as 80% of Korean healthcare is provided by private parties. National Library of Medicine. Allowing individuals to store medical information on their mobile phones was intended to give them more autonomy over how such data would be used, similar to the goals of the patient portal service mandated by the U.S. EHR systems. Healthcare Informatics Research. However, ever since the amendments to the Contagious Disease Prevention and Control Act (CDPCA) were passed after the MERS outbreak, the government had given certain agencies such as the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) the authority to collect and share information such as location data, CCTV footage, prescription records, and card transactions of individuals. JAMA Network. With public agencies like the KCDC having direct access to personal data of infected individuals, this project exposed significant privacy concerns related to PHR accessibility.

In fact, My Healthway was the primary means to enable accurate contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. JAMA Network. For example, citizens were frequently required to show their vaccination records to enter public areas and also received real-time notifications on where infected individuals were, often exposing details about others’ private lives. BBC. Although actual names or addresses of those that contacted the virus were not available, people receiving the alerts were able to make inferences about others’ private matters such as infidelities and affiliation with secret religious cults, leading to widespread public mockery and witch hunting online. BBC. Furthermore, though active news coverage of location data may have contributed to curbing the spread of the pandemic, businesses that were revealed to be settings of mass contact experienced severe financial losses. In other words, adopting a single, unified system of storing PHRs through the My Healthway platform had put both organizations and individuals at serious risk of privacy invasion, and the decision to make such information available to the public exacerbated the problem.JAMA Network.

Conclusion

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