HIPAA Doctors’, Nurse's and Hospital Basic Security Requirements

One important behavior of doctors is that they tend to be highly mobile. Doctors perform patient rounds in a hospital or travel from their offices to clinics or other hospitals. As a result, any solution must incorporate the mobility they require. Along with this mobility comes the challenge of being able to interface with various devices and systems. Given that hospitals, clinics, offices, and other places where doctors will need access to information will all have different systems, a solution for security must incorporate the factor of a homogenous system base.

Another aspect of doctor interactions is that many administrative tasks, such as claims processing and billing, are not directly managed by the doctor, but rather delegated to a trusted administrative assistant. As a result, issues of confidentiality and nonrepudiation must take into account that a patient’s information will be handled by numerous individuals whom the doctor trusts to keep it confidential.

The last feature of doctors’ requirements is that they often do not use dedicated terminals when going about their business. Most workstations are shared, sometimes among dozens of people (nurses, doctors, administrators, and others). As a result, doctors must be able to identify themselves at a shared terminal, with reasonably quick access time, and then terminate that access almost as quickly.