PurposeThe purpose of this assignment is to prepare you for the dissertation process by developing the research methodology section for your research paper.You will receive feedback from your instruct

Week 05: Research Methodology

By
Sushil Kumar Mahato

(Student ID: 002855483)

for ITS-833-01 (Information Governance) course as part of the degree of EX-PhD

An assignment submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

In

Information Technology

School of Computing & Information Sciences University of the Cumberlands

Professor: Dr. Mary Cecil

Due: Jun 03, 2020

Patient Data Privacy in a fast-paced world

The privacy of countless Healthcare patients is compromised due to the frequent data breaches in the healthcare system in the US each year. The majority of such breaches take place on account of data exchange between Healthcare Providers as they continue to gain extraordinary access to the data of the patient as the Healthcare systems are increasingly getting digitally linked with the advancement in technology. The Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA) Omnibus Rule established the final edit to the HIPAA confidentiality & assurance rule. It significantly enhanced Regulatory oversight and privacy safeguard for the business associates. The purpose of this study is to scrutinize (utilizing observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic) the effects of the shift in the policy on the healthcare privacy breaches within the business associates in the Healthcare system across the US. The findings of this research establish the positive impact of Regulatory efforts on Healthcare patients (Yaraghi et al., 2018).

Data Collection Method

Data Source

Data available in the public domain, reported by OCR was used (DHHS, 2017). It enlists all the Healthcare privacy breaches that took place between Oct 2009 and Aug 2017 in the US.

Study Design

An Interrupted Time-Series Analysis with control outcome variables was done for examining the effect of HIPAA Omnibus application. The business associates were the focus of the new HIPAA Omnibus rule; therefore, it can be appropriately assumed that the application of HIPAA Omnibus rules leads to the disruption of the frequency of Healthcare policy breaches amongst business associates (Wagner et al., 2012). This statistical method is a suitable quasi-experimental exploration method to quantify the effect of HIPAA Omnibus polices on population-level consequences and is being progressively used to inspect the efforts of diverse policies in Healthcare situations (McGinty et al., 2016).

Results

Thought the window period of Oct 2009 till Aug 2017, the data indicates that there were 2,010 Healthcare data breach incidents. Out of this 291 were related to business associates. There were 52 incidents which remained uncategorized. Remaining were for the covered entities. As per the HIPAA categorization, 1,410 were related to care, providers, 253 were related to Healthcare plans, 4 incidents related to clearinghouses. All things considered, 2.17 Healthcare privacy breaches happened out of 1,000 active physicians (Yaraghi et al., 2018).

Findings

The result shows that the HIPAA Omnibus Rule implementation lead to a large-scale reduction in the number of Healthcare breaches among business associates and prevented 180 possible occurrences, that could have impacted approximately 18M US residents.

Limitations

This study had several limitations, such as:

1. Only incidents impacting more than 500 patients are included. Less significant breaches impacting less than 500 patients are not captured in the OCT report, hence they were out of the examination.

2. Breach occurrences that could not be recognized immediately and could only be found at a later stage of the time were not included in the analysis. Although those would be rare incidences.

3. Although the study uncovers the benefits of HIPAA Omnibus rules, further analysis is required to identify the cost associated with the implementation and compliance.

Conclusion

The results indicated that the HIPAA Omnibus rules application resulted in a significant decrease in the number of incidents. Therefore, HIPPA Omnibus rule implementation is successful in reducing the number of Policy breach incidents.

Reference

DHHS. (2017). Cases currently under investigation. Office for Civil Rights website. https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breaches/breachreport.jsf.

McGinty, E., Busch, H., Stuart, A., Patrick W., Fry, E., & Jones, T. (2016). Implementation of prescription drug monitoring programs. Health Affairs (Millwood), 23(9):10-13.

Wagner, K., Soumerai, M., Zhang, F., Ross, A., & Degnan, R. (2012). Segmented regression analysis of interrupted time series. Clin Pharm Therapy, 12(2):23-29.

Yaraghi, M., Shama, R., Raman, S., & Gopala, R. (2018). The Role of HIPAA Omnibus Rules in Reducing the frequency of medical data breach. Milbank Quarterly, 42(7), 27–61. https://doi.org/10.111/148-009.1221