Support Information Governance

Protect Patient Privacy with Respect to his/her Personal Information.

Protecting patient privacy with respect to his/her personal information has become an essential goal for hospitals in the UK. Ensuring that a hospital organisation conforms to all applicable Information Governance (IG) requirements is one of the key objectives for them. Typically the key controls are monitored by an Information Governance Steering Group and an IG risk management process. However this does not act as a complete deterrent and incidents pertaining to IG breach are still being reported by many hospitals. These breaches vary in severity and highlights the need for senior clinical executives to have an effective review process to ensure an effective management of these risks.

While we would encourage hospitals to independently validate which principles, regulations, and requirements are most relevant to them, there are various basic privacy principles which are generally applicable, some of which are:

• Usepersonal data only for authorized purposes
• Collect personal data as and to the extent absolutely necessary
• Use the minimum necessary data to achieve the authorized purpose
• Access to data should be on a strict need-to-know basis
• Maintain accountability for access to and use of data
• Implement adequate controls to ensure that access is secure

In addition, regulations are also enforced by the Data Protection Act of 1998, which requires that personal data be used for specific purposes and processed in accordance with the rights of data subjects. For healthcare organisations it is sometimes complicated and time-consuming to implement safe-guards to ensure that a patient’s data is being viewed appropriately or that an employee has the correct access to records which are appropriate for his role.

The Solution: Caradigm Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Caradigm Identity and Access Management (IAM) has a set of robust features to manage roles and report on potential data breaches:

• IAM Provisioning can be used to create, modify and remove access for employees in accordance with their role. The provisioning process can be triggered by something as simple as the creation of the users’ identity in the HR system (e.g. ESR), and being able to automate a change of access with ease of administration is particularly useful for Doctors who are on rotation with limited time.
• IAM Privacy Auditor can be used to enable rapid incident investigation across applications in the Hospital system to provide data-driven analysis and system usage that takes into account the caregiver’s usage behaviour. It not only shows who has logged in and where, but it is also possible to track which patients have been viewed in which applications.

These features provide caregivers with consistent accelerated access to all of their clinical applications and patient records, whilst allowing improved data security and increased ROI.

The Impact: Better Access, Better Healthcare

Hospitals can leverage Caradigm’s IAM products to help them meet the following healthcare objectives:

• Increased regulatory compliance
• Accelerated time to complete external and internal audits
• Centrally monitored access to electronic patient records across multiple applications
• Protected patient privacy and strengthened internal controls
• Enhanced insight into how your systems are being used