Protecting the data: Security and privacy

Hearing the word “data” may cause individuals to think about a wide variety of topics, from how much data they have used on their phone plans this month to the data that their social media accounts store. Data are defined as “individual facts, statistics, or items of information.” In healthcare, the amount of data is increasing, and data that once were only recorded on paper have now shifted to digital records. With this increase in data comes an increased responsibility for the need to secure them safely. This chapter focuses on data security, which includes information about specific privacy and security rules of healthcare data in the United States. These include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule and its requirements for protecting data, the HIPAA Security Rule along with the best practices for securing data, and the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule along with the steps to take if a data breach occurs. Additional considerations for data security on an international level will also be presented.