Stakeholders Influence System Purchase . Describe Information

¶ … stakeholders influence system purchase . Describe information systems health care setting. Explain system selection acquisition process. Describe relationship system selection strategic goals.

In order to refer to the electronic health records and the ways that HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules apply to EHR, one most briefly present an overview of the technology and its implications. As Wager, Lee and Glaser point out (2009), the EHR is the type of medical record about a patient where the information can be shared and, as such, accessible, to medical staff across more than one health care organization (p. 111).

The advantages of EHR translate primarily into better efficiency, increased productivity and cost reduction. The fact that the medical staff can easily access the available information on the patient is equivalent to a decrease in the number of investigations that need to be conducted for the patient. At the same time, however, translating the information on patients from paper to an electronic device means a great economy of space in a medical unit.

All these elements conclude into the fact that greater accessibility of information and overall cost reduction will result into better patient care and resource allocation. The medical services are likely to be improved because of a professional EHR in place and many concrete examples where this happened in practice, in medical units, come to support this conclusion.

It is obvious, however, that electronic access to patient information creates a potential issue with the security of the elements that are shared between different medical units. If one considers the difference in terms of information sharing between EHR and medical records on paper, the latter are usually locked in a room and available only in certain circumstances. With EHR, there is always the risk that the information could be accessed in the informational system by anybody who would want to commit the necessary resources in this sense.

The HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules were conceived exactly to address this kind of potential problems. These were the first security standards aimed at protecting personal information in the case of EHR, but also of additional informational systems, such as the CPOE systems (CMS, 2007). There were two primary factors that led to the apparition and implementation of HIPAA standards. First, HIPAA standards aimed at the protection of patient information and, second, at the same time, they proposed the assurance that this protection is complementary to a higher level of accessibility.

The HIPAA standards have a significant applicability to EHR. There are two distinct levels of HIPAA impact that should be discussed. First of all, the HIPAA provide for a protection of the patients' right to accessing information on their own records and to have them better understand how their information is distributed and who in turns has access to it (Rodriguez, 2011).