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New ISO Guidelines for Protecting Electronic Health Records

BayBiotech.NET

Two ISO documents recently published provide harmonized principles and guidelines for the security of electronic health records.

ISO/TS 21547:2010, Health informatics – Security requirements for archiving of electronic health records – Principles covers the basic principles needed to securely preserve health records in any format for the long-term. In the document, a holistic process covering records maintenance, retention, disclosure and eventual destruction has been extensively covered.

Additional guidance for implementing ISO/TS 21547 is included in technical report ISO/TR 21548:2010, Health informatics – Security requirements for archiving of electronic health records – Guidelines. This report provides complementary guidelines to ISO/TS 21547, as well as a practical method and tools for the development and management of eArchives.

Main features include the retention and records maintenance for a patient for entire lifespan reaching to 100+ years regardless of time and place. The two ISO documents also take into account the dynamic nature of health data, which may be modified through time, its sensitivity and high security requirements, particularly as transferred between services organizations and healthcare providers, and more.

In addition, the two ISO documents also take into consideration new initiatives in the field, such as the growing trend to reinforce patients’ self determination and participation in their own healthcare, and the data that must be available to them.

The two documents were developed by ISO technical committee ISO/TC 215, Health informatics and to find out more on this follow the link: http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1304

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