Patient health information has always required to be handled with privacy. People in the medical industry are entrusted with confidential information that they are supposed to protect. If patient information is not handled with privacy, it can cause more harm to a patient than good. Patients can go through humiliation and social segregation in case their health information is leaked. In the past, medical care providers were required to keep the confidentiality of their customers by ethical codes. Presently, the issue of patient health information has also become a matter of legal concern. The government has created several laws requiring patient health information privacy to be observed. These laws are important because they make this issue more important for practitioners to take seriously.
One of the early laws concerning the privacy of patient health information was the Privacy Act of 1974. This privacy act concerns the privacy of health information collected and maintained by the federal government (Solove & Schwartz, 2020). Government agencies at the national level were also expected to comply with this law. The law offers clear guidelines on the steps to be followed for disclosure of this information. This law did not affect the healthcare providers in any manner. It implies that after this law was implemented, the healthcare providers continued to be guided by ethical and not legal codes. The law was a good start in creating legal regulations on patient information privacy, but it needed to include healthcare providers.
A new act was created in 1996; a new law was written and approved. This law was named Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA). This law entailed much information about patient health information, privacy, and accountability. The first law catered to a national standard in the USA about how patient health information privacy should be handled. This Act protected the use of patient information without the patient’s consent or knowledge (Savage & Savage, 2020). The law also provided guidelines on how patient information can be used for important roles such as health analysis and data collection through protecting the patient’s privacy and confidentiality. HIPPA plays a major role in helping to create patient confidentiality and protection of the privacy of their health records.
In the 1990s, it was realized that much discrimination was against people based on their genetic information. Information on genetics is sensitive because it links people to their entire family lineage and history. There was a need to protect patients’ genetic details to stop discrimination at the time. An act was created in May 2008. The Act is named (Genetic et al. Act (GINA). Through this Act, GINA genetic information about patients is now kept confidential (Lenartz et al., 2021). This Act provides guidelines on how this kind of information is supposed to be accessed.
The privacy of patients’ health information is threatened nowadays by technology. The evolution of technology has been a huge challenge because it creates more chances for data to be leaked and compromises patient confidentiality. This led to the creation of the Health Information Technology for Clinical Health Act (HITECH) of 2009 (Kim & Lee, 2020). HITEC promoted adopting electronic data storage in the USA and ensured that it came with the necessary measures of privacy and protection for its data. This Act also acted as an amendment to the HIPAA Act. This Act increased penalties on the HIPPA Act for some data breaches. It was a good act that protected patients’ privacy and health information.
Research has proven that the privacy of health information is vital. It helps to create and foster open communication. When patients are afraid that their data will not be safe, they are likely to withhold important information from their medical practitioners (Bani Issa et al., 2020). This is especially true on data that can be used to stigmatize them based on their illness. Data privacy is important in fostering clear communication between patients and doctors. The other factor is patient safety. The safety of a patient can be at risk if their information is leaked. This would be worse if they suffer from certain illnesses that are highly contagious (Tapuria et al., 2021). Finally, patient health information helps foster high-quality care without hospital bias or discrimination.
Conclusion
Patient health information is an issue of importance when it comes to the healthcare system. In the past, issues regarding patient confidentiality were only handled within the context of ethical codes. Now, laws have been developed to ensure that patient privacy is maintained within the healthcare system. The first one was the health privacy information law created in 1974. The challenge with this law is that it only focused on federal data, leaving a gap in the medical practitioners. The Other was HIPAA, which was created in 1994. This law was more comprehensive in creating a unified way of handling patient data in the USA. Other laws that followed later were like GINA 2008 and HITECH 2009.
References
Bani Issa, W., Al Akour, I., Ibrahim, A., Almarzouqi, A., Abbas, S., Hisham, F., & Griffiths, J. (2020). Privacy, confidentiality, security, and patient safety concerns about electronic health records. International nursing review, 67(2), 218–230.
Kim, H., & Lee, J. (2020). The impact of health IT on hospital productivity after the enactment of the HITECH Act. Applied Economics Letters, 27(9), 719-724.
Lenartz, A., Scherer, A. M., Uhlmann, W. R., Suter, S. M., Hartley, C. A., & Prince, A. E. (2021). The persistent lack of knowledge and misunderstanding of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) more than a decade after its passage. Genetics in medicine, 23(12), 2324-2334.
Savage, M., & Savage, L. C. (2020). Doctors routinely share health data electronically under HIPAA, and communicating with patients and patients’ third-party health apps is consistent: interoperability and privacy analysis. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(9), e19818.
Solove, D. J., & Schwartz, P. M. (2020). Information privacy law. Aspen Publishing.
Tapuria, A., Porat, T., Kalra, D., Dsouza, G., Xiaohui, S., & Curcin, V. (2021). Impact of patient access to their electronic health record: systematic review. Informatics for Health and Social Care, 46(2), 194–206.
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