Running head: RESEARCH PROPOSAL: LEGAL ISSUES Research Proposal: Legal Issues Related to Data Breaches Name Institution 1 RESEARCH PROPOSAL: LEGAL ISSUES 2 Research Proposal: Legal Issues Related to Data Breaches Proposal As healthcare organizations and providers continue to leverage the positive impacts of the integration of technology into the management of patient data and information, the potential for unauthorized access is equally high. Data breaches remain one of the significant sources of legal and ethical issues for these organizations and their employees due to the enactment of laws against it most American states. Also, the variations in the requirements of these laws make compliance difficult since the elements of patient information that should be protected remain unclear thereby making the notification of affected patients a complicate process despite the legal implications of non-compliance. Therefore, the purpose of the proposed research paper is to examine the factors that can result in security breaches that would result in unauthorized access to the protected health information of the patients of a hospital. The study would focus on the trends of these incidents in the United States, the relevant laws governing data breaches, and the measures that healthcare organization can adopt and implement to strengthen the security of their health information infrastructure against unauthorized by access. Also, the research questions that would guide the performance of the proposed research study are as follows: What are the legal issues that would arise from the data privacy breaches that occur in the healthcare setting due to information exchange between interdisciplinary teams within a provider network? What are the measures that can be taken by the provider organization to protect all the processes involved during the exchange? RESEARCH PROPOSAL: LEGAL ISSUES 3 Choi, S., & Johnson, M. E. (2017, May). Do Hospital Data Breaches Reduce Patient Care Quality?. In Presentation at the 14th Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, La Jolla, CA, June (pp. 26-27). Choi and Johnson (2017) wrote that the objective of the study was to estimate the link between the data breach and the quality of services delivered by hospitals. The scholars conducted a systematic review of hospital data breaches in the country from 2011 to 2015 to generate data on the AMI mortality rate the resulted from the incidents. According to their findings, Cho et al. (2017) concluded that data breaches have several negative implications on the quality of care and raised legal issues that can be addressed through several security measures and systems. Fox, M., & Vaidyanathan, G. (2016). Impacts of healthcare big data: A framework with legal and ethical insights. Issues in Information Systems, 17(3). In this article, Fox and Vaidyanathan (2016) examined the processes for analyzing big data without the risk of leaking patient data and the methods for protecting the privacy of patient information during the implementation of the data analysis method. As a means for solving these challenges, the scholars proposed a comprehensive framework for dealing with the legal and ethical issues that might arise, as well as those related to other dimensions of big healthcare data. Ronquillo, J. G., Erik Winterholler, J., Cwikla, K., Szymanski, R., & Levy, C. (2018). Health IT, hacking, and cybersecurity: national trends in data breaches of protected health information. JAMIA Open. RESEARCH PROPOSAL: LEGAL ISSUES The purpose of this study by Ronquillo and his colleagues was the determination of the current cybersecurity threats to health information technology in the United States. It was an investigation that was influenced by the need to understand the dimensions of the problem, identify the legal and ethical implications, and the solutions to strengthening the security of health IT infrastructure. Therefore, the findings from the research would contribute to the knowledge on the trends of data security breaches in the future. 4 RESEARCH PROPOSAL: LEGAL ISSUES 5 References Choi, S., & Johnson, M. E. (2017, May). Do Hospital Data Breaches Reduce Patient Care Quality?. In Presentation at the 14th Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, La Jolla, CA, June (pp. 26-27). Fox, M., & Vaidyanathan, G. (2016). Impacts of healthcare big data: A framework with legal and ethical insights. Issues in Information Systems, 17(3). Ronquillo, J. G., Erik Winterholler, J., Cwikla, K., Szymanski, R., & Levy, C. (2018). Health IT, hacking, and cybersecurity: national trends in data breaches of protected health information. JAMIA Open.
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