Improved care/reduced medical errors

Access to information about care you receive elsewhere gives your health care providers a better, more complete picture of your health. That means your health care providers can make sure the care they provide doesn’t have a negative impact with other treatment you may be receiving. For example, when you can’t remember what medications you are taking, health information exchange can make information about your conditions and medications available to your health care providers so that they will know the right things to do instead of doing something that might be harmful.

Tracking for protection

When your health information is shared electronically, information about access to your record is stored electronically. This can include the identity of those who accessed your record, the date of access, the types of information accessed, and the reason your record was accessed. It easier to enforce laws and regulations governing access when electronic records are used than it is when paper records are used.

Risks

Identity theft

Although health information benefits from the security measures and legal requirements occurrences of identity theft still persist.  Identity theft occurs with both paper files and electronic files; however, a breach of electronic files may affect more records than a breach of paper files.

Hackers

As long as information technology has existed, there have been efforts to break into records of all kinds. Electronic health care information benefits from the security measure developed by other industries. Health care is the last frontier of information technology, so it benefits from anti-hacking security measures already in place in other industries. However, hackers will continue to try to break security codes just like they do in other electronic systems.

Information provided was obtained from the Health Information Security and Privacy Toolkit.