introduction: hospitals are responsible to respond to legitimate demands for health information release while protecting the confidentiality of patient health records. this study investigated and compared laws and policies of health information disclosure for legal authorities in iran and some selected countries. methods: this descriptive-comparative study included health information disclosure...

introduction: hospital information system (his) is a computerized system used for management of hospital information as an electronic device and has an indispensible role in the field of qualified healthcare services. nevertheless, compared to other industrial and commercial systems, this information system is lagged in using the information technology and applying the controlling standards for...

background: health records serve several purposes and must be retained to meet those purposes. these varied purposes influence how long health records must be kept, or their retention period. the present study aimed to recognize laws and procedures related to retention of health records in selected countries and provide a proposed guideline for iran. methods: this was an applied, descriptive-co...

introduction: patient- centered and perspective approach which prefers prevention to cure, to improve and promote the services and care, not only recognizes free flow of patient’s information, but also concurrently is concerned about maintaining security and privacy as an important feature of health care system. the purpose of this study was to evaluate the level of accessibility and privacy of...

OBJECTIVES Homeless people lack a secure, stable place to live and experience higher rates of serious illness than the housed population. Studies, mainly from the USA, have reported increased use of unscheduled healthcare by homeless individuals.We sought to compare the use of unscheduled emergency department (ED) and inpatient care between housed and homeless hospital patients in a high-income...

Medical audit of hospital records has been a major component of quality of care assessment, although physician judgment is known to have low reliability. We estimated interrater agreement of quality assessment in a sample of patients with cardiac conditions admitted to an American teaching hospital. Physician-reviewers used structured review methods designed to improve quality assessment based ...

BACKGROUND Simulation-based medical education (SBME) has traditionally been conducted as off-site simulation in simulation centres. Some hospital departments also provide off-site simulation using in-house training room(s) set up for simulation away from the clinical setting, and these activities are called in-house training. In-house training facilities can be part of hospital departments and ...

BACKGROUND Current practices of reporting critical laboratory values make it challenging to measure and assess the timeliness of receipt by the treating physician as required by The Joint Commission's 2008 National Patient Safety Goals. METHODS A multidisciplinary team of laboratorians, clinicians, and information technology experts developed an electronic ALERTS system that reports critical ...

Although executives and physicians at the Beth Is-rael Deaconess Medical Center in Boston have had reason to take great pride in their advanced clinical computing system, they recently had a wake-up call when the system suffered a full-scale failure. Before the crash, the medical center's information-systems staff had designed and implemented a variety of applications to aid clinicians in carin...