Health Care Informatic Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Health Care Informatic - Essay Example For instance, an employee with the proper security clearance can look up medical information on the patients he is treating, but he can also look up ex-girlfriends, neighbors and anyone else his security clearance allows him to access. Because of such abuse, many information systems professionals run random system checks to see which employees are accessing records and for what reasons. However, it is not feasible to think that every employee can be monitored all of the time. Health care informatics make a patient's medical information accessible to anyone that might need it, but they also make it vulnerable to prying eyes that don't. Even worse, information that is on a computer system may be vulnerable to access by outside parties that were never intended to access the system, like "hackers" for instance. Such people could perform mass identity thefts, since social security numbers and even credit card numbers are often stored in health care information systems. This would result in unimaginable losses for patients, as well pose a huge liability for the health care provider. Some people worry that security precautions have not been able to keep up with the speedy evolution of health care informatics, and this may be a valid concern. If an entire information system was crippled or destroyed by such a hostile attack - or even by an act of nature, like a flood or tornado - and the back-up systems for the data were not preserved, an entire healthcare network could lose countless patients' medical records, possibly putting the lives of some patients at risk or even causing possible deaths due to treatment errors. Th e shift from filing paper charts on patients to digitally storing medical records has definite advantages, but such technology certainly comes with a serious set of security risks. As with many modern medical topics, the subject of the ethical use of medical records is under great scrutiny. Should private insurance companies be allowed to use medical records to deny coverage to people who are too old Should life insurance be denied to people with genetic disadvantages, like maternal cancers or paternal hypertension Medical research questions also come into the debate. Is it fair to collect data and research from medical records without the consent of the patients For instance, can you look at the rate of blindness of patients with diabetes at a certain hospital without informing the patients or their families New technological advances are even making it possible to enter a patient's symptoms and allow a computer program to suggest a diagnosis. Many health care providers think this is a wonderful new technology that will assist doctors in caring for their patients, but many others think it will become a crutch that will prevent physicians from properly practic ing the art of medicine. When should computers be used to compile information Who should access this information How vulnerable does technology make medicine All of these questions about health care informatics will need to be answered as the field evolves. 2. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, also known as HIPAA, is an act issued by the United States government that attempts to define the relationship between a patient's right to confidentiality and the need for medical

Enterprise and Entrepreneurial Management Essay - 1

Enterprise and Entrepreneurial Management - Essay Example The Business Plan The business plan is the enterprise on paper. It is an attempt to capture in so many words and graphs what the business would be or look like when it is eventually implemented. It is an attempt to depict on paper the idea brewing in the mind of a would-be entrepreneur that he feels very strongly would transform into a successful venture. The business plan is the idea initially taking textual and graphic form. Literature is abundant with what makes a good business plan. Many authors would establish business plan formats containing the elements that would make a sound plan composition together with the elements’ sequencing. This paper however shall not dwell on the creation and development of these elements but shall focus on the process of planning, providing weight to the issue of the why and the how of the planning process. Business Plan Elements and the Planning Process Kuratko and Hodgetts (2009) offer the following elements in a business plan: executive s ummary, the business opportunity, market potential, market analysis, competition analysis, technical data of product or service, commercial strategy, methodology of operation, vision-mission and financial projections. These elements however are outputs of an enterprise planning process that proceeds with the idea generation, setting up of strategic objectives, analysis and research of market, understanding competition, understanding the financials and formulating the competitive strategies (Kuratko and Hodgetts, 2009). Critical Analysis Seeding the Idea: It s simple logic that there is always a purpose or reason for business, and if one pursues the economic theory... The paper tells that it is simple logic that there is always a purpose or reason for business, and if one pursues the economic theory that business is meant to generate profits for its owners, it follows that the business must be attractive to its intended customers to generate a green bottom line. An enterprise begins with an idea, whether it is a product or service, and that idea must answer a need of the market. This process of idea generation is otherwise known as the creative process or simply, creativity. Of course, it is now known, courtesy of brilliant thinkers such as Harper and Drucker, that creativity is the seed of innovation, where innovation is the finished product or service that benefits the market. It was Drucker who said that â€Å"innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship – the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.† It would be necessary as an approach to this analysis to first define what an entrepreneur is b efore proceeding to create the attribute silhouette of the successful enterprise owner. As literature has an abundance of such a definition, this paper shall adopt the version of Drucker in his famous book Entrepreneurship and Innovation. An entrepreneur, according to Drucker, is one who always searches for change, responds to it and explores to the maximum its potential as an opportunity. Many authors and researchers have ventured into identifying the attributes that successful entrepreneurs possess.