Risk assessment for non-profit hospital Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Risk assessment for non-profit hospital - Essay Example Generally, non-profit organizations do not perform risk assessments mainly due to insufficiency of funds. Since non-profit organizations have only limited sources to raise funds, they would find difficulties in their day to day operations if they allot money for risk assessment program. This paper will particularly perform a risk assessment for non-profit hospitals and discuss various aspects related to the issue. Importance of Hospital Data Hospital data may include a pool of documents including inpatient data, outpatient data, pricing data, hospital room rates, hospital financial data, patient case sheets, medicine stock data, medicine details, length of patient stay and discharge data, staff data, and other administrative and strategic documents. Evidently, hospital data have considerable significance on a healthcare environment because they play an inevitable role in promoting quality care and patient safety. According to the Hospital Data Project, â€Å"hospital data are now re quired to serve a variety of purposes including supporting activity monitoring, performance measurement, casemix-based funding, service planning, and epidemiological analysis† (HDP, 2003). ... In the view of Sorgente, Fernandez, and Petrie (n.d.), past patient treatment records are necessary for hospitals to give immediate and quality care to patients in future visits. In addition, staff data are very crucial to facilitate better distribution of duties and responsibilities among the hospital staff, particularly nurses. Therefore, it is extremely important to keep the hospital data secure and unreachable to unauthorized parties. If the data are improper or unsecure, they would be accessible to external people and this situation would adversely affect the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of data. To illustrate, when the hospital data are lost due to network attacks or any other reason, the hospital management cannot obtain access to past patient case records and medicine stock details whenever needed. Undoubtedly, this situation would reduce the quality of the care and hence challenge the patient safety. Likewise, some important data like diagnosis reports and ot her patient/disease detail would lose their confidentiality once the hospital data become unsecured. Under such circumstances, the victims (patients) may file lawsuits against the hospital. Finally, the authorities concerned cannot the ensure integrity of hospital data if those data are prone to unauthorized access. According to a report by UC Davis Health System, cancelled operations, false or delayed test results, and poor quality patient can be the direct implications of unsecure hospital databases. Kinds of Attacks Malware attack is likely to threaten a hospital database. Experts suggest that hospital databases are under the threat of malware attacks. Hackers try to access hospital data and thus manipulate hospital records. Such attacks can cause dreadful harms to