Secure Electronic Health Record Exchange: Achieving the Meaningful Use Objectives

This research addresses the urgent need to create a comprehensive guide for healthcare providers to follow to exchange electronic health records securely and meet the associated the Department of Health and Human Services´ Meaningful Use objectives. Healthcare providers have numerous legal, financial, and ethical motivations to exchange patient data securely. Unfortunately, healthcare providers are provided with minimal guidance for actually achieving this goal. To this effect the proposed research lays out a comprehensive and homogeneous approach for implementing secure electronic health record transmission. Additionally, we present a standard process of testing and validating a healthcare organization´s security and privacy practices. To solidify the effectiveness of our proposed research, the implementation plan and testing tools have been evaluated in a real-world HIMSS Stage 6 healthcare organization.