According to data collected by the HHS Office for Civil Rights, over 113 million individuals were affected by protected health information breaches in 2015. Ninety-nine percent of these individuals were victims of hacking, while the remaining 1 percent suffered from other forms of breach such as theft, loss, improper disposal, and unauthorized access/disclosure. A quick […]
According to data collected by the HHS Office for Civil Rights, over 113 million individuals were affected by protected health information breaches in 2015. Ninety-nine percent of these individuals were victims of hacking, while the remaining 1 percent suffered from other forms of breach such as theft, loss, improper disposal, and unauthorized access/disclosure. A quick look at the trend from 2010 shows that health information data breaches are on the rise. An even deeper look at this report shows that network servers and electronic medical records are the leading sources of information breaches, at 107 million and 3 million, respectively.
Sadly, security is not the only issue that medics face when sharing medical records. A 2014 article in the New York Times explains the difficulty medics face when trying to send digital records containing patient information. While the intention is noble—to improve patient care coordination—doctors are facing problems with their existing large file sharing options.
To help doctors share files such as medical images in an easier and safer way, we will explore four factors that should be considered.
Medical records are sensitive and confidential in nature. This means that handling them should be guided by set industry policies, in this case, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), for example. HIPAA is actually a response to security concerns surrounding the transfer and storage of medical records, in this case, images.
HIPAA places responsibility on medics and healthcare providers in general to secure patient data and keep it confidential. As a result, non-compliance could lead to legal action, which can be costly. Usually, HIPAA makes sure that all Personal Health Information (PHI) is covered, outlining more stringent rules on electronic PHI, mainly because a security breach is more likely to affect a larger number of patients, all at once.
It is a medic’s responsibility to ensure that the selected EFSS solution is HIPAA-compliant if you want to maintain patient trust, keep positive publicity, and avoid steep HIPAA fines imposed after a breach. In fact, the first time you commit an offense, HIPAA will charge approximately $50,000, a figure that escalates accordingly with each subsequent offense.
This is the second level of security you should consider before settling on a large file sharing solution. As much as an EFSS service provider is HIPAA-compliant, you need to ensure that measures outlined in HIPAA are taken.
When you read about patients’ rights as outlined in HIPAA, specifically the ‘Privacy, Security and Electronic Health Records’, you will notice that information security is emphasized. For this reasons, medics should ensure that patient data is encrypted in order to prevent it from being accessed by rogue colleagues or professional hackers.
It is entirely important that all hospital departments—ranging from cardiology, imaging centers and radiology, among others—encrypt medical images and files to further protect patient privacy. Better still, encryption should be both at rest and on transit, and files should only be shared with authorized specialists and physicians as well as the patients themselves.
To further tighten security, these files should be encrypted with non-deterministic encryption keys instead of fixed ones, whose passwords can be hacked. The best thing about this technique is that even when faced with a security breach on the server side, hackers cannot access the encryption keys. Additionally, you can opt for EFSS solutions that offer client-side encryption alone, barring the service provider and its employees from accessing this information.
Compared to other medical records, medical images present a great challenge with regards to file size. It is actually reported that a significant number of sequences and images are an average of 300MB. Additionally, average file size for a standard mammography image and a 3D tomography image are 19MB and 392 MB, respectively. While these file sizes already seem too large, Austin Radiological Association (ARA) predicts that by 2024, annual data from its 3D breast imaging files will reach 3 petabytes. These facts expose the storage challenges that medics face.
A glance at the process of finding medical images for active cases, storing them, and archiving those of inactive cases shows the immense need for medics to find a reliable and convenient large file sharing solution that caters to these storage needs.
A weak server could get overwhelmed with data, progressively becoming inefficient and inept as more files are uploaded into the system. The best way to solve this issue is by using cloud-based services that automatically scale your files according to your needs. This way, you will upload more files in the server, significantly reducing hardware costs by approximately 50 percent, especially when this is done on the cloud as opposed to in-house. In addition to these perks, the cloud will allow you to share these images faster and more conveniently, saving both time and storage.
While technology helps solve issues such as security and storage, over-reliance could actually lead to medical errors, incidents that are dreadful to patients and medics as well. As reported by Eric McCann of Healthcare IT News, medical errors cost America a colossal $1 trillion each year, and 400,000 Americans die annually due to these preventable mistakes.
Even though the cloud has been paraded as a solution to reduce incidences of medical error, the need to be watchful and keen can never be overstated. Take, for example, the erroneous click of a mouse and mislabeling of data. A case study on Kenny Lin, MD, a family physician practicing in Washington, D.C., which is detailed in his 2010 piece in the U.S. News & World Report, shows us how easy it is to make a mistake with technology. Dr. Lin nearly made a wrong prescription by accidentally clicking on the wrong choice in his EMR system.
Now, what if you mislabeled a patient’s radiology report? Wouldn’t that start a series of misdiagnosis and treatment? Could you imagine the damage caused? It is for this reason that even when technology makes it easier to share large, sensitive files like medical images, you should counter-check and make sure that the file is labeled correctly and sent to the intended, authorized recipient.
The sensitivity of medical files is eminent, and with data breaches on the rise, it is vital to ensure the privacy of all medical documents, including large medical images and files. To reduce the possibility of a data breach, any EFSS solution used to share these files should guarantee a reasonable level of file security and HIPAA compliance. In addition to that, its capacity to efficiently handle file sizes and offer easy access to these files should not be ignored. Lastly, as you remain cautious when feeding data into the system, create a safe backup for your data just in case of a data breach. By taking such precautions, medical files can be shared between all necessary parties easier and more safely.
Author: Davis Porter
Image courtesy: freedigitalphotos.net, stockdevil
