Kathy Downing, MA, RHIA, CHPS, PMP, CPHI serves as Vice President, Information Governance, Informatics, Standards, Privacy and Security for AHIMA.
On May 11th, Kathy Downing, will serve as a panelist at Becker's Health IT + Clinical Leadership 2018. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place May 10-11th 2018 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Kathy's session, click here.
Question: Who or what are the disruptors that have your attention? Why?
Kathy Downing: Cybersecurity is a key disruptor that has my attention. It seems that almost every healthcare organization I have interacted with, and even one state, has had a security breach that compromised my protected health information and individual identifiers. The fact that healthcare is so dependent on social security numbers is extremely troubling in this day and age. We can't protect it so we shouldn't be using it! Healthcare needs to invest in cyber expertise, technology and training, but the bottom line is that healthcare needs an individual identifier.
Q: What did you notice about your healthcare experience the last time you were at the receiving end as a patient?
KD: One of my favorite things to do is to ask my physicians, and my friends who are practicing physicians, what they think of the EHR. Then I just sit back and let the rant begin. There are key privacy and security issues that come up. One common issue is workarounds that are not sanctioned or appropriate but that physicians feel they have no other choice to get their work done. I believe that having an information governance program with assigned staff stewards would give these physicians a place to go to have their problems resolved so they don't risk HIPAA violations in order to document, to communicate with other providers or to communicate with vendors.