Goal 3: Inspire Confidence and Trust in Health IT

Main Purpose (Objectives):

1. Protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability of health information
2. Inform individuals of their rights and increase transparency regarding the uses of protected health information
3. Improve safety and effectiveness of health IT

What to Expect:

Protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability of health information

• • Creation of appropriate and enforceable federal policies to protect the privacy & security of health information.
  • • Impose direct liability on business associates for compliance
  • • Establish new restrictions on the sale of protected health information
  • • Establish new restrictions on disclosing health information for marketing purposes
  • • Specify the conditions under which covered entities must notify individuals, HHS, and the media of security breaches
• • Enforcement of existing federal privacy and security laws
  • • Establish increasing levels of culpability, increasing penalty amounts
• • Encouragement of privacy & security to be included into the functionality of health IT
  • • Certified EHRs must:
    • • Encrypt health information
    • • Establish access controls
    • • Generate audit logs
    • • Automatically log off
• • Identifying security vulnerabilities and developing solutions
  • • Preventing fraud, waste and/or abuse
• • Identifying & communicating best practices
  • • electronically among states with varying privacy policies
  • • to future health IT workers to ensure compliance with these policies

Inform individuals of their rights and increase transparency regarding the uses of protected health information

• • Inform individuals about their privacy & security rights and how their information may be used and shared. More information can be found online at the HHS Health Data Privacy and Security Resource Center.
• • Increase transparency regarding the policy development around sharing protected health information. See more at the official ONC blog, Health IT Buzz
• • Reporting of security breaches

Improve safety and effectiveness of health IT

• • Implementation & best practices tools to be provided – BeaconEvidence & Innovation Network
• • Evaluation of safety concerns and updated approaches to health IT safety – Institute of Medicine’s Patient Safety and Health IT Project
• • Monitor patient safety issues and address concerns