Oct 24
2014
Patient Portals: Security Concern or Effective Tool?
Guest post by Martin Edwards, MS, CHC, CHPC, compliance officer, Dell Healthcare.
Patient portals offer an unprecedented opportunity to engage consumers, provide a customized care experience and potentially change behavior. Yet they also introduce new security concerns for both patients and providers.
A question we often hear from healthcare providers regarding security is: How much protection against negligence does meeting the HIPAA requirements really provide? That question is particularly germane to patient portals, which create an additional entry point and more risk to the security of protected health information (PHI). The laws and regulations in these cases can be confusing.
Fortunately for providers, “safe harbor” is offered in those cases where the provider can prove that they have properly encrypted all devices that contain PHI. Under the HIPAA security rule, as long as PHI is encrypted according to National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines, it is no longer considered “unsecured” and providers are effectively exempt from improper disclosure being considered a “breach.” Thus, the HIPAA breach notification rule doesn’t apply, and, by extension, the provider can avoid potential fines from the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Since most breaches of PHI reported to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to date have related to the theft or loss of unencrypted mobile devices, encrypting the data is a primary defense against data loss and against the consequences of improper disclosure.
While patient portals add risk, they also confer many benefits to healthcare organizations, including enhanced patient-provider communication and empowerment of patients. Some studies have found that portals can also enable better outcomes for patients. These benefits are behind the HIPAA privacy rule’s “right of access,” which allows individuals to examine and obtain a copy of their PHI. Meaningful use requirements also require eligible professionals to exchange secure emails with at least 5 percent of their unique patients. Since portals are an ideal way to meet this requirement, organizations seeking to comply with Stage 2 criteria have an incentive to adopt them.