Protecting your mHeal Data: IG is Key by Michelle L. Kirk, CRM, IGP

The 6th blog in the Healthcare Predictions & Perspectives blog series. This blog series is focused on healthcare transformational strategies that are enabled through Health IT and Health Information Governance best practices.

The ability to exchange data with my physician through personal computers and mobile devices is something that has increased the efficiency of the quality time I spend onsite with my doctors and I am extremely pleased by the technology evolution in the space. But as an Information Governance professional who knows a bit about privacy and security risks - especially as they relate to PHI - the new status quo in mobile patient care brings to light a few considerations.

Clearly patients like me are demanding higher quality and efficiency in our care, while the market is driving lower costs. Since electronic systems are being relied upon do drive a lot of the efficiency gains, most of this information is now being transferred and stored electronically. Moving to web based applications to drive much of the communication between patients and providers is putting an increasingly significant burden on providers to secure individual patient health information that is now being stored and transferred as part of the normal course of patient care.

As mobile technology and patient data management continues to develop, Information Governance policies and practices are now becoming even more important for each and every provider to have in place. In addition to communication websites, mobile connectivity to HMIS, mHealth, telemedicine, and connected devices provide a few examples of how the information management is evolving in healthcare - and each of these represents significant data breach risks.

The basis of any Information Governance program built on the Principles must include the fundamental principle of Protection - this means that any IG program should be designed to ensure a reasonable level of protection for records and information that are private, confidential or that otherwise require protection. Though we need to rely heavily on security technology to facilitate this in the world of mobile data exchange, it's extremely important for providers to have strict security policies in place that require an adequate level of protection. Without policies to set out both manual and technological requirements for the supporting tools, a provider may not know whether adequate security and privacy goals are being met. Policies also offer providers a chance to truly think through where all risky data is stored, how it gets transferred, and who has access to it. Mapping private data through the information lifecycle is an important part of understanding where different levels of risk exist.

With widespread data breaches constantly in the news, I'm hoping providers see the importance of solid Information Governance practices at every level in Healthcare. Providers cannot simply rely on software vendors to solve this problem; in order to continue supporting the increasingly mobile application environments they need to stay relevant, we all (including patients) need to

Understand where our data lives - including servers, clouds, mobile devices - especially the high risk data like PHI

Understand the information lifecycle and how certain data may be transferred

Understand the technologies around storage and transfer and the risks those methods represent

Establish solid foundational policies and procedures to govern the data through its lifecycle and make it as secure as it can be - through both manual and software supported methods

We must embrace the requirement to govern our information in a way that makes processes as efficient as we demand, while still protecting its value.

Join our Twitter Chat: Healthcare Transformation: Predictions and Perspectives #InfoTalk

On March 17th at 9:00 PT/12:00 pm ET, @IronMtnHealth is hosting a Twitter chat using #InfoTalk to further the dialog on transformational strategies that are enabled through Health IT and Health Information Governance. If you have been involved in Health IT and information governance-related projects, we'd love to have you join.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2016/industry/healthcare-information-man...
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