Assignment 2: LASA—Issues in Establishing RHIOs

This assignment facilitates comprehensive knowledge transfer in  regard to the components, infrastructure, and functionality of the  regional health information organization (RHIO).

Scenario: 

You have been hired as the director of public health informatics for  the Centervale County Department of Public Health because you have  valuable knowledge about the functionality and functioning of RHIOs.  This is what you have learned about Centervale’s plans:

• The Centervale County department of public health plans to deploy a county-wide RHIO.
• The department requires healthcare establishments and practitioners  in the county to migrate from a paper-based health records system to an  electronic medical records (EMR) system within the next five years.
• The department also requires all practitioners to connect to the  county Health Information Exchange set up by the RHIO within the next  five years.

Directions:

Your primary responsibility is to propose policies and mandates that  ensure maintenance of confidentiality and privacy of protected health  information. Keeping that in mind, prepare a 10–12-slide PowerPoint  presentation for the Centervale County Department of Public Health  officials that includes the following:

1. Discuss the challenges of privacy and confidentiality within the history and evolution of public health informatics.
   1. What opportunities will the migration to an EHR and the implementation of a RHIO provide to address these challenges?
2. Address the following issues with establishing a county-wide RHIO:
   1. Identify and discuss the privacy concerns about the collection and distribution of health information across the RHIO.
   2. Describe the access rights of individuals and any groups to the data collected and stored by the RHIO.
   3. Identify and explain interoperability standards deployed by the RHIO.
3. Propose a list of policies and mandates that would ensure  maintenance of confidentiality and privacy of protected health  information as mentioned in the above issues.
4. Evaluate and identify the best tools or system of public health  informatics to manage the county’s public health information and explain  how that tool or system will uphold privacy.
   1. Give examples of how key public health information systems in the  United States use these policies and mandates to guarantee the security,  confidentiality, and accessibility of the data they contain.
   2. Describe some of the search tools available to locate and analyze public health data.
5. Examine how the policies, mandates, tools, and standards that have  evolved in the development of RHIOs might contribute to a global  strategy for use of information technology (IT) in healthcare to reduce  health inequity.

Use the PowerPoint Notes pane on each slide to explain your  discussion points as if you were actually presenting this information to  a group.

Include citations of appropriate laws and regulations to justify your positions.
Include a reference slide in APA style.