Question

Health care organizations manage large volumes of personally identifiable information (PII), also known as personal health information (PHI), which is subject to special requirements for privacy and security. Data classification is a practice that can help health care organizations meet the challenges of access and security of PII. Explain how data classification can assist with access and security challenges, particularly in relation to the use of data for health information management functions. Provide at least one example from readings and research.

Answer 1

Handling patient data is a very crucial functionality of a health care organization. If there is any compromise or mishandling of data, then the patient’s right to privacy will get compromised and the healthcare may have to face legal suits and defamation cases for the same. This can be quite bad for the overall brand value of the organization. Hence healthcare organizations come up with various interventions to handle patient data. Data classification is one such intervention. With the help of data classification, the patient data can be filtered and be based on crucial keywords. These keywords can be related to an ailment or disease symptom or treatment. Data classification can help the physicians to retrieve important documents and research based on the keywords. Hence the diagnosis of the ailment as well as treatment will get facilitated quite easily. Moreover, data classification system can have multiple layers of access and may have stored patient data in encrypted form. The data can be accessed from such systems, only through authorized access. This way, the sanctity as well as privacy norm of the data also gets maintained effectively. SO data classification is a critical practice for healthcare organization.