IT Security and Disaster Recovery Management

            
             Shared care is a term largely used in health care that involves the establishment of partnerships between professionals; i.e. medical providers, and laymen; aka, patients, where they share a common goal; i.e. good health, and essentially implies the sharing of health information. This requires a common concept of information security among healthcare providers and a system to maintain compliance to the security requirements within the healthcare community. Today's electronic cyber-world is flooded with hackers, crackers and all types of electronic pranksters ranging from the individual script attackers (script kiddies) to cyber-terrorists (Netschert, 2008). Increasing costs in the healthcare industry are necessitating the development of more streamlined systems involving electronic records, which in turn, makes the protection of individual patient records and other electronic information a major concern and is the reason for the implementation of the HITECH Act. Assessing risk in HIT and in Healthcare is no easy task, but it is a necessity. This SLP will discuss the challenges and solutions of Risk Assessment as it pertains to HIT.
             The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act .
             The HITECH Act was enacted under Title XIII of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 to improve American health care delivery and patient care through an unprecedented investment in HIT. The HITECH Act provisions are designed to work together to provide the necessary assistance and technical support to providers, enable coordination and alignment within and among states, establish connectivity to the public health community in case of emergencies, and assure the workforce is properly trained and equipped to be meaningful users of Electronic Health/Medical Records (EHRs). Meaningful use is just the term coined to help promote the spread of EHRs to improve health care in the United States by offering certain incentives to those hospitals, clinics and providers who implement an EHR within a specific implementation window that began in 2011 and ends sometime in 2016 (HITECH Act, 2014).