Response Paper on Nursing articles
It cannot be doubted how much incorporating health information technology has changed how patient care is addressed in present healthcare systems. The use of health information technology has made it easy for doctors to access patient data instantly making the process of patient care more efficient and personal. However, a major challenge that has been experienced in the use health information technology is the inability for nurses to have health information technology knowledge and how they can ensure patient personal and private information security as discussed in (Dubois, D’Amour, Pomey, Girard & Brault 2013). McGonigle & Mastrain (2015) on the other side bring us to an understanding of the role of nurses in protecting the rights of privacy and confidentiality of patients.
Where I am working as a nurse, the management has insisted on the culture of promoting patient information security. In order to design exceptional platforms of security, the management team has created passwords on every desktop and computers to resist access of unauthorized persons. As a nurse within the organization, we have been perfectly trained on how to access patient data from a general hospital website from out computers using one particular password that can be used by the rest of nurses as well. However, this is equally risky because of the exchanging nature of data resources which can lead to a security breach. This habit could also pose a risk to available patient data because of using devices that are not encrypted.
I think apart from securing desktops and computers, hospitals should use authentic encrypted systems that could be more helpful in securing private and personal data (Ozair, Jamshed, Sharma & Aggarwal 2015). I think this is the area where hospital that has incorporated HIT should improve on. Because computers could be easily found to be in operation even when the user is not logged in, hospitals should also develop a culture to always remind nurses to sign out once they are done on their computers so that when somebody else logs in, they use a different account. This would help in achieving safety in patient data.
