Week 4 Health Info
Directions
- Discussions are designed to promote dialogue between faculty and students, and students and their peers. In discussions students:
- Demonstrate understanding of concepts for the week
- Integrate outside scholarly sources when required
- Engage in meaningful dialogue with classmates and/or instructor
- Express opinions clearly and logically, in a professional manner
- Use the rubric on this page as you compose your answers.
- Best Practices include:
- Participation early in the week is encouraged to stimulate meaningful discussion among classmates and instructor.
- Enter the discussion often during the week to read and learn from posts.
- Select different classmates for your reply each week.
Discussion Question
Case Study: A 65-year-old woman was just been diagnosed with Stage 3 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was informed of this diagnosis in her primary care physician’s office. She leaves her physician’s office and goes home to review all of her tests and lab results with her family. She goes home and logs into her PHR. She is only able to pull up a portion of her test results. She calls her physician’s office with this concern. The office staff discussed that she had part of her lab work completed at a lab not connected to the organization, part was completed at the emergency room, and part was completed in the lab that is part of the doctor’s office organization.
The above scenario might be a scenario that you have commonly worked with in clinical practice. For many reasons, patients often receive healthcare from multiple organizations that might have different systems.
As you review this scenario, reflect and answer these questions for this discussion.
- What are the pros and cons of the situation in the case study?
- What safeguards are included in patient portals and PHRs to help patients and healthcare professionals ensure safety?
- Do you agree or disagree with the way that a patient obtains Personal Health Records (PHRs)?
- What are challenges for patients that do not have access to all of the PHRs? Remember, only portions of the EHRs are typically included in the PHRs
Sample Answer
Week 4 Health Info
The patient, who is a 65-year-old woman, presented in the case, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma stage 3. This is a type of cancer found in the lymph nodes on both sides of the diaphragm. Occasionally, patients diagnosed with various diverse conditions counting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, can go home and continue using PHR to participate in their healthcare to enhance the quality and efficacy (Dameff, Clay & Longhurst 2019). PHR technology has been revealed to play a very significant role despite the negative impacts it has revealed.
Pros and Cons of Situation in Presented Case Study
Several pros and cons have been revealed in the patient’s case study. For instance, pros such as a patient having family support, patient having access to the PHR at home, patient is interested in her care, she easily can take her data and share it with her oncologist, she can easily request for medications refill through the PHR and besides can request her physician questions without necessarily calling.
When it comes to cons, it has been revealed that the client has incomplete records, data might only be connected to the provider’s office EHR, the client has lots of information accessible but cannot understand its meaning, and besides, there is data’s breaches.
Safeguards Included in The Patient Portals and PHRS To Help the Patients and
Health Care Specialists Ensure Safety
The patient portals are passwords that the patient protects, and according to what I have learned in the past, an individual requires having an invitation to link from the provider’s office (Hong, Jiang & Liu 2020). A portal and a computer similarly need protection by a firewall, but individuals sometimes turn them off on the PCs. Any information the provider shares with the patient via the portal still is covered under HIPPA laws through PHR, and HIPPA doesn’t cover consumer access services. Theoretically, EHRs may communicate to each other if connected to a similar health information exchange or the consumer access system at the point where the data is exchanged. An ideal example of this is the SuperScripts, that facilitate this particular form of exchange.
If I Agree or Disagree with The Way, A Patient Obtains PHRs
According to my perception, the process in which information is shared remains an ideal one. Electronic PHRs increasingly are being afforded to the clients via health plans, care providers, and independent vendors. These particular tools provide a wider variety of characteristics for gaining, storing, and apprehending healthcare data. The patient presented in this case acquires PHRs while at home that can be labeled as standalone. She, therefore, fills in the information from individual memories and records, and data is stored on patients’ computers. She can freely decide whether to share information with the providers, the family members, and those elaborate in the care. This is guaranteed because the patient’s system and that of the physician connect to facilitate care. This makes things run more smoothly.
Challenges for the Patients That Don’t Have Access to all of EHRs
Generally, it’s good to note that only the portions of EHRs typically are included in PHRs. Therefore, a significant challenge is that patients sometimes end up with numerous PHR’s from several physicians’ offices because information does not connect (Reisman 2017). Another challenge is that if the PHR can’t exchange data with the rest of the health systems, PHR’s will be ‘information islands’ containing subsets of the clients’ data, isolated from other patients’ information with inadequate access and transient value.
