Chester County Medicine Fall 2019 - 15

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The prolonged accumulation of health records of a particular
locality can be retrieved in the future to make assumptions on the
health status of the general public. The health informatics will
enable stakeholders in the health sector to plan for mass programs
appropriately, both educational and medicinal, to mitigate the
occurrence of certain illnesses. However, the deduction made from
such data may be inaccurate since it represents a broad coverage
which may not reflect the actual situation per person. The barrier
has been alleviated by the emergence of a virtual enterprise
data warehouse that is vital in assembling healthcare analytics
(McGlothlin et al., 2017).
These tools are essential in analyzing the performance of
hospitals and related organizations, identification of opportunities
for refinement, formulating in-depth policies, and complying with
the set government health regulations.
The transition of codes from International Classification
of Diseases, Ninth Edition (ICD-9) to ICD-10 in the United
States is an illustration of development in healthcare technology.
According to the new directive, healthcare professionals and
institutions that are covered by the Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are required to transmit
information on the patients' conditions and treatments using
the standard ICD-10 format (Khera et al., 2018). ICD-10 offers
a uniform language for reporting and monitoring diseases to
allow different regions to share and compare data in a standard
and convenient way between hospitals and states. Despite the
advantages of technology in healthcare, there exist several setbacks
such as data security leading to a data breach where a patient's
information is accessed without authorization. In the medical
field, a core concern is the capacity of hospitals to ensure that
the medical history of a person is kept extremely confidential
for ethical and legal purposes. The vulnerability of health
informatics following rising incidences of network hacking can
expose classified information; although the HIPAA is designed to
minimize such cases (Edemekong & Haydel, 2019). The privacy
rule in HIPAA stipulates that the Federal government should
establish laws to guarantee the protection of electronic health
information for confidentiality and integrity. Therefore, the ICD10 was created to enable the government to undertake healthcare
planning, but the system is prone to data breeches hence the
need for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
(HIPAA).

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Edemekong, P. F., & Haydel, M. J. (2019). Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act. National Center for
Biotechnology Information.
Khera, R., Dorsey, K. B., Krumholz, H. M. (2018). Transition to
the ICD-10 in the United States: An emerging data chasm. Jama
Network Open, 320(3), 133-134. doi: 10.1001/jama.2018.6823.
Krummel, T. M. (2019). The rise of wearable technology in
health care. JAMA Network Open, 2(2), e187672. doi: 10.1001/
jamanetworkopen.2018.7672.
McGlothlin, J. P., Madugula, A., & Stojic, I. (2017). The virtual
enterprise data warehouse for healthcare. Proceedings of the 10th
International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems
and Technologies, 469-476. doi: 10.5220/0006253004690476

References

Merav, B. N., & Ohad, H. (2017). Patient-centered care in
healthcare and its implementation in nursing. International Journal
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Barry, M. J., & Edgman-Levitan, S. (2012). Shared decisionmaking-the pinnacle of patient-centered care. The New England
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Sharma, S., Ayyaswamy, J., & Kishore, J. (2015). Technologydriven healthcare. Advanced Techniques in Biology & Medicine,
3(3). doi: 10.4172/2379-1764.1000146

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Chester County Medicine Fall 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chester County Medicine Fall 2019