Weary About Your Electronic Health Records? Don’t Be!

photo by freedigitalphotos.net

Due to the high publicity that ‘Crackers’ (people who gain entrance to electronic systems for malicious intent – not to be confused with Hackers – ones who self-learn how systems work for hobby or educational purposes) get in today’s media, it is easy to understand why you may be afraid of having your Paper Health Records (PHR) turned into Electronic Health Records (EHR) and stored in a database. But let me pose this to you, do you believe that your PHR are actually safer?

From Computer Engineer James Hollenbeck: 

The problems  people  are not considering in the safety of PHR is the fact that they are guarded by humans – prone to leaving things lying around, misplacing items,  damaging, stealing…etc. Human laziness and lack of attention is the leading cause of Hospital Records being breached, not because of illegal entrance into their computer system. 

Secondly, there exists no audit trail for your PHR. The chain-of-custody of your records could change many times within hours during a day and no track record of who had what when exists other than by word-of-mouth by those who “may” have had your records. Here-in lays the brilliance of EHR that should put some ease to your worried minds.

• Having a centralized database of your EHR means any incident away from home requiring Emergency Medical Care is much less serious in terms of being provided inadequate/harmful treatments due to no one knowing your medical past. What used to take hours (hospital transfer of Medical Records) now takes minutes.
•  Your EHR are safe from disaster; flooding, fire, tornado…and the list continues. 
• Your records are now highly encrypted, so unless someone discovers the encryption/decryption key, which is next to impossible, then there is no way for anyone to read your records in the event your records are “stolen”. 
• The idea of the audit trail; everyone who gains access to the system will leave their own “trail of bread-crumbs”.  So, the source of every event can be determined and dealt with.

photo by freedigitalphotos.net

 In all honesty, if you really care about the safety and security of your Health Records, then you would be in full support of EHR and the benefits they will offer you. Don’t be fooled by technological “incidents” in the media – they never report (and are not professionals in the Computer Engineering/Science/Networking and Data Storage technologies) exactly what happened, and by who.

-- James Hollenbeck
   BS Computer Engineering
   Michigan Technological University 2009