Institute:Office of National Coordinator (ONC) Workforce Training Curriculum
Component:The Culture of Health Care
Unit:Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security
Lecture:Tools for protecting privacy and confidentiality
Slide content:Health Information Security Is Probably a Trade-off 9.3 Chart. Health information security is a trade-off (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, 2012). 17
Slide notes:In the big picture of health information, security represents a trade-off. At one end of the spectrum, no security is in place, and a website shows the user any page requested, which is appropriate most of the time. At the other end of the spectrum is the extreme level of security employed by government agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Administration (NSA, enn - ess -ay). Neither of these extremes works well for health care security. Health information cant be freely available for anyone to look at, but it also cant be buried in the kind of total security that the CIA or NSA uses. For extremely high-level security, there is a pricea person cant, for example, bring an ordinary laptop into a CIA building. In health care settings, many different people may be looking at information or may need to access it quickly in order to maintain the workflow and get the work done. For health information security, there has to be some kind of happy medium that protects information but still allows it to be quickly and easily accessed by authorized people. There must be a balance between the strength of the security and ease of access to clinical information, especially in critical situations. Breaking the glass refers to a quick means for a clinician who doesnt have access privileges to certain patient information to gain access under circumstances such as a patient emergency. 17