“ One rule of thumb for using mobile ”
—Anne Steciw
Look Before You Leap One of the most worrisome trends seen by the
Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is the tendency for healthcare organizations to deploy mobile devices without updating their security policies—sometimes deploying devices before there even is a policy. “That’s not the case with EHR technology and other
technologies,” said Lisa Gallagher, senior director of privacy and security at HIMSS, during the ONC roundtable. “But with mobile tech, people use it in their everyday life. They want it now and they get it. So in a lot of cases we’re actually going back and catching up on the policy. It’s not just documenting what the policy is, but what it should be, regardless of how we got where we are and the fact that we deployed these things before we were organizationally ready.” “The challenge from the provider standpoint,” added
Jacob DeLaRosa, chief of cardiothoracic and endovascular surgical services at Portneuf Medical Center in Pocatello, Idaho, “is that when new technologies like the iPad come out, physicians want to use them right away, but the policies aren’t there yet.” He said that it could take months for them to be put in place.
A JPG Is Worth a Thousand Words
There’s no question that mobile device security policies need to be in place to protect patient privacy. But sometimes these policies can hinder a provider’s ability to benefit from using a mobile device. Panelist Christopher Tashjian, president of River Falls, Ellsworth and Spring Valley Medical Clinics in Wisconsin, is a small-town family doctor who sees patients in a variety of settings—even the county jail—and is passionate about both medicine and technology. He used to use text messaging in the emergency room to send pictures of X-rays to an orthopedic surgeon, who could advise him on how to handle patients with complex fractures. Though the practice was helpful, Tashjian said he was
forced to stop “because the HIPAA people at the hospital said ‘you can’t do that.’” He is working on ways to work around it, such as using a picture that has no patient identifiable data, but he would like to see the vendors step in and build something from the ground up that he can use.
devices in healthcare is when in doubt, assume it’s not secure.
11 “Technology can do a lot of things,” said Tashjian, who
has previously presented to ONC on a variety of health IT issues. “To me, it’s incumbent on the vendors to give us technology that satisfies patient privacy.”
Public Access One rule of thumb for using mobile devices in
healthcare is when in doubt, assume it’s not secure. When asked about using public Wi-Fi to input confidential patient information, panelists agreed that you have to assume the pipe is not secure. But monitoring providers who are off-site presents a challenge. “Because most of our providers are out in the field, they want to be able to download their information,” said panelist Meri Shaffer, registered nurse and a clinical systems analyst with Montefiore Home Care in New York City, adding that her organization was “definitely not” comfortable with allowing employees to go to a McDonald’s or Starbucks to log on. “There’s policies we have about not allowing them to
do that,” she said, “but it’s difficult to monitor that and regulate it.” Montefiore gave out Sprint cards to healthcare providers in the field, but found the cards weren’t always very reliable.
Practical and Secure
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CONNECTION
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
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