Security
Health care providers in the US are bound to comply with HIPAA regulations. These regulations specify what patient information must be held in confidence. Something as seemingly trivial as a name is viewed by HIPAA as protected health information. For this reason, security has always been a top concern for the industry when dealing with the adoption of patient portals. While there may be systems that are not HIPAA compliant, certainly most patient and practice portals are secure and compliant with HIPAA regulations. The use of SSL and access control patterns are commonplace in the industry. Patient access is typically validated with a user name and password.
Read more about this topic: Patient Portal
Famous quotes containing the word security:
“Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Those words freedom and opportunity do not mean a license to climb upwards by pushing other people down. Any paternalistic system that tries to provide for security for everyone from above only calls for an impossible task and a regimentation utterly uncongenial to the spirit of our people.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)