Stewart Karen J
Medicine Services, Charleston Area Medical Center, 3200 MacCorkle Avenue SE, Charleston WV 25304, USA.
Respir Care. 2004 Apr;49(4):361-4; discussion 364-6.
Computerization in health care is rapidly advancing and is improving patient safety (eg, computerized physician order entry decreases the frequency of medical errors) and practitioner effectiveness and efficiency. Computerization and other developing technologies raise concern about the privacy of health information. In 1996 Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which included privacy provisions that went into effect in April 2003. HIPAA has important impacts on health care providers. With the tremendous growth of health care information systems comes the need to standardize the storage and sharing of health information, so there is an initiative underway to develop a National Health Information Infrastructure, which will set standards for health information exchange among consumers, providers, and the public health sector, as well as consolidate the "silos" of health information that are in place today.
医疗保健领域的计算机化正在迅速发展，并且正在提高患者安全（例如，计算机化医师医嘱录入减少了医疗差错的发生率）以及从业者的效能和效率。计算机化及其他不断发展的技术引发了对健康信息隐私的担忧。1996年，国会通过了《健康保险流通与责任法案》（HIPAA），其中包括于2003年4月生效的隐私条款。HIPAA对医疗保健提供者具有重要影响。随着医疗保健信息系统的迅猛发展，需要对健康信息的存储和共享进行标准化，因此正在开展一项倡议，以开发国家健康信息基础设施，该基础设施将为消费者、提供者和公共卫生部门之间的健康信息交换设定标准，并整合当今存在的健康信息“孤岛”。
