please respond to the following discussion post as a peer commenting on the response. “The HITECH Act is the piece of government policy that affected my organization. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act was enabled as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. (Rights (OCR), 2009). This Act was to address the issues and use of health information technology. This Act directly affects the security and privacy concerns that come with the electronic transmission of healthcare information. Since the late 90s, I have seen many changes implemented from the paper chart to the electronic medical record since I have been in healthcare. My primary healthcare field is within radiology and the fact that we transmit images to radiologists within our facility and to radiologists to work from home over their computer systems. This Act changed healthcare as far as the security and the release forms that when into the different firewall methods to protect the healthcare information being transmitted. In addition, we implemented password protection on all of our medical devices and contract agreements between physicians and vendors. The information systems (IT) department was hit the greatest with upgrading all the servers at our facilities to have the correct firewalls and the correct agreements between vendors to be allowed into those servers. This HITECH Act also came with notifications of any data breaches. We also had to encrypt emails and secure everything that had patient history information or PHI on it. (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, n.d.).
References:
Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act: Impact on HIPAA Privacy and Security Provisions. (n.d.). American Speech-Language-Hearing Association; American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Retrieved November 4, 2021, from https://www.asha.org/practice/reimbursement/hipaa/…
Rights (OCR), O. for C. (2009, October 28). HITECH Act Enforcement Interim Final Rule [Text]. HHS.Gov. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/specia…
