In this digital age, confidentiality, privacy, and ethical issues may arise. In the healthcare settings, healthcare   professionals are becoming proficient in the use of technology, while at the   same time they must always maintain high ethical and legal standards. In recent   years, there have been escalating issues such as data breaches and unethical   practices of healthcare professionals with social media, for example, which   could result in violations of different laws such as HIPAA and also decrease   trust in a healthcare organization. For this discussion, choose an article   from the HIPAA Journal website.

Synthesize ethical issues surrounding health information.

Include the following aspects in the discussion:

1) Summarize the article.

2) Discuss with your peers the most important aspects of the article.

3) What was interesting about it, and what did you learn from it?

4) What information could have been added to the article?

REPLY TO MY CLASSMATE’S DISCUSSION TO THE ABOVE QUESTION AND EXPLAIN WHY YOU AGREE. 

                                                       CLASSMATE’S POST

Technologies Supporting Telehealth Have Placed Healthcare Data at Risk by Steve Alder, in summary, discusses how the increased use of telehealth to provide patient care during the Covid-19 pandemic has created an increased risk to healthcare data, specifically vulnerability in the technology that supports telemedicine. Alder recapitulates a study done by Kaspersky in the summer of 2021 where fifty of the most popular applications that were being used to provide telehealth services were analyzed for vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited to gain access to patient data. While there were no vulnerabilities found during this study, it is heavily augmented in this article that this does not mean vulnerabilities do not exist, only that they were not found by these researchers.

What is interesting about this article is how heavy the issue of cyber attacks and the exploitation of vulnerabilities in technology associated with patient data is labeled, but these issues are described very vaguely with no real details or examples attached to the article to explain how or in what way the data was being used. I’m sure part of this is a security measure; why give cyber attackers more ideas? But it also makes it hard for people like me who have minimal technical experience in this field to imagine and understand what measures should be implemented to prevent these issues. I think it would be important for further research to be done on this so healthcare systems knew exactly what the vulnerabilities were and how to protect our data from being accessed.

                                                                        Reference

Alder, S. (2022, February 2). Technologies Supporting Telehealth Have Placed Healthcare Data at Risk. Retrieved from HIPAA Journal: https://www.hipaajournal.com/technologies-supporting-telehealth-are-placing-healthcare-data-at-risk/