Dr. Martin Makary on Striking a Balance between Protecting and Exchanging PHI

Imprivata recently hosted a 6-part webinar series, “Healthcare 2020 - Clear Visions and Strategic Directions for the Decade”. Featuring industry luminaries including Dr. Eric Topol, Dr. John Halamka and Dr. Joseph Kvedar, the series provides an in-depth look at key healthcare topics such as the role of mobile technology in healthcare, how genome sequencing and other technologies are changing the nature of patient care, and IT’s role in making information easy to access for clinicians, while keeping patient information private and secure.

For the next several weeks, we’ll be providing highlights from each webinar via the Imprivata blog. This week, we focus on the first webinar in the series, “Striking a Balance between Protecting and Exchanging Protected Health Information” featuring expert speaker Dr. Martin Makary.

Dr. Makary is an active surgeon and researcher, serving jointly on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and School of Public Health. He is a regular medical guest on CNN and the author of several books on public health and health policy, including the recently published Unaccountable, a New York Times bestselling book.

In this webinar, Dr. Makary reviews how both the public and private sectors have emphasized the need to secure patients’ protected health information (PHI). Newer developments, such as Stage 2 Meaningful Use, call for eligible hospitals and professionals to implement appropriate, secure sharing of PHI.

Dr. Makary also discusses the role of transparency in healthcare, and explores the future possibilities of the healthcare industry, including new and innovative styles of patient interaction, including “open notes”, which allow patients to view, in real-time, exactly what their care provider is adding to their file. This concept is being pioneered across a test sample of hospitals nationwide, and is proving to build trust between doctors and their patients.

Dr. Makary also notes the balance between the push for transparency in hospitals and the cautious push-back of doctors challenging this idea. He goes on to explain how transparency, if not implemented gracefully, could cause a negative impact on hospitals that are more apt to take on higher risk cases and surgeries that tend toward lower success rates. Dr. Makary advocates the idea of risk-adjusted transparency moving forward to bring fairness to the system.

Incentivizing the advancement of clinical processes serves as a catalyst to growth in the healthcare space, improving both clinician efficiency and overall transparency between organizations, according to Dr. Makary.

Don’t miss out on this great information - be sure to watch Dr. Makary’s complete presentation, “Striking a Balance between Protecting and Exchanging Protected Health Information”, available now for on-demand viewing.