| How to Ensure Confidentiality with Your EMR |
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Maintaining confidentiality of patient records is among the hottest topics related to electronic medical records hence EMR vendors have been striving to implement security standards in their products so that confidentiality and privacy issues can be dealt with. Following are some of the steps that could ensure confidentiality in the EMR systems:
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| Establishing an Oversight Group |
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| You should establish an oversight group which should be able to manage information security, confidentiality and access. The group should also oversee the provision of training and awareness, disaster recovery, etc. The members of this group should make sure the monitoring of the access and should be abreast with all the technological and regulatory changes. |
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| Restricted Access to Patient Identifiable Information |
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| It should be kept in notice that there is role-based access to the patient identifiable information. Thus, access should be granted based on the role of each person who is involved in the provision of patient care. Different caregivers should be able to access records for only those patients to whom they are extending care. |
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| Stringent Audit Controls |
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| If you are not able to associate the physicians and patients together to control the access to information then more stringent audit controls and monitoring should be instituted. |
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| Design the System with Sufficient Redundancy |
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| EMR system should be designed in such a manner that there is sufficient redundancy to manage any system downtimes or data losses. It is important to have disaster recovery plans in place. You should create backup copies and shadow copies of data with fail-over capabilities. |
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| Ensuring an Ongoing Audit Trail |
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| An ongoing audit trail should be implemented for all the accesses and transactions made through the system. This should follow a detailed audit of all access logs to see for any hints of unwanted access. Also check the compliance of the system with different confidentiality policies. Stringent information security and auditing capabilities should be employed in this respect. |
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| Making Provisions for Restricted Visit Types and Restricted Records |
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| You should also ensure to make provisions for restricted visit types such as drug treatment, HIV, mental health, etc. and restricted records such as employees, VIPs, etc. |
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| Strictly Follow State and Federal Regulations |
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| You should strictly follow the federal and state regulations on all the medical information and ensure compliance in all respects. |
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| Database Review and Report Generation |
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| The review of database and generation of reports for purposes other than direct care should be completely restricted. It is important to follow strict regulations for the print versions of data also. |
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