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Information security is a crucial aspect in most organizations. The loss of sensitive information poses considerable threats to the concerned parties. In this regard, various organizations in conjunction with the government have established information security standards that promote the safeguarding of electronic health information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and HITRUST CSF constitute some of the most widely used information security standards in the health care sector. Top Essay Writing Services

HIPAA standards define information security guidelines that focus on protecting certain aspects of information in the health care industry. These standards establish rules that ensure an individual’s health information remains confidential, retains its integrity, and is secure. HIPAA standards encompass the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule. The Security Rule stipulates guidelines that ensure the protection of electronic health information for individuals. The scope in this regard entails information that a particular entity creates, receives, uses or maintain. The Security Rule promotes the appropriate administration, and physical and technical safeguarding of particular information (Colling & York, 2010). Top Essay Writing Services  The Privacy Rule promotes the protection of sensitive health information that is identifiable with certain individuals. The Security Rule entails a narrower scope of protecting confident information identified by the Privacy Rule.

The interplay between the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule ensures the protection of particular health records and other personal aspects of health information. In this regard, HIPAA standards require the concerned entities to safeguard individuals’ health information through the identification of various threats and adopting necessary measures. In addition, HIPAA defines guidelines that require the setting of limits concerning the use and disclosure of health information without the consent of the patient (Scholl, 2008). It gives patients control over their health records so that they can examine them and request any necessary changes. The flexibility associated with the Security Rule facilitates the safeguarding of information while allowing particular entities to enhance various aspects of patient care through the adoption of new technologies.

HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF)

This security framework defines standards that apply to organizations that create, use, store, and transact personal health and financial information. The framework provides guidelines concerning the adoption of various medical technologies and electronic transactions. The adoption of the CSF framework promotes the safeguarding of electronic information and the creation of an efficient healthcare system. Top Essay Writing Services The CSF framework cross-references various existing standards such as HIPAA and ISO (Wilson & McEvoy, 2012). In this regard, the implementation of the framework adopts an approach that has minimal cases of redundancy and ambiguity. The framework defines guidelines that eliminate various challenges relating to information security in the health care sector.

HITRUST CSF comprises of an Information Security Implementation Manual, and Standards and Regulations Mapping. These components facilitate the realization of a comprehensive tool that regulates the management of health and other crucial information. Top Essay Writing Services The Security Implementation Manual provides flexibility concerning various aspects of an organization such as the type and complexity of the organization’s environment. The manual entails recommendations for practices relating to security governance and security control. The CSF framework supports alternative controls that cater for various information systems due to the consideration that some organizations may face challenges concerning the implementation of the standard CSF requirements (Wilson & McEvoy, 2012). CSF’s alternative control provides guidelines that facilitate easier management when a system control fails. The alternative control adheres to the objectives of the traditional CSF framework so that an organization’s information security system does not become vulnerable.

Top Essay Writing Services Standards and Regulations Mapping ensure that the CSF framework adhere to acceptable regulations in the healthcare industry. In this regard, healthcare organizations can relate various CSF specifications with other standards such as HIPAA. This is a crucial provision concerning compliance where multiple standards apply to an organization. CSF’s Standard and Regulations Mapping covers standards such as COBIT 4.1, NIST SP 800-53/800-66 and 16 CFR Part 681. This comprehensive coverage provides a tool that is applicable in almost all aspects of information security.

Comparison

While the HITRUST CSF framework adopts a comprehensive coverage of various federal and states regulations, HIPAA employs a narrow scope concerning the implementation of health information security. In this regard, HITRUST CSF allows diverse entities in the healthcare industry to adopt a framework that enhances various control requirements concerning the protection of health information. An organization employing the CSF approach does not have to worry about the requirements of other standards as CSF guidelines incorporate other standards as well. In comparison, HIPAA does not incorporate other standards such as COBIT in the stipulation of its various information security standards.

Another variation between the two standards of information security is the aspect concerning the provision of an alternative control based on the consideration that the traditional approach does not favor all organizations. Top Essay Writing Services The CSF framework promotes significant levels of flexibility concerning an organization’s type, size and complexity of the environment. In this regard, the framework provides an information management and control approach that is easy to adopt in various organizations. Thus, although the implementation of the framework may vary, health organizations can adopt a similar process concerning the preparation and establishment of an effective and secure information system. Top Essay Writing Services On the other hand, HIPAA’s approach is more restrictive and does not provide for an alternative approach in case the traditional approach proves ineffective.

Summary

The integration of information technology in almost all aspects of our lives has necessitated the establishment and adoption of various information security standards. While some of these standards, such as HIPAA standards, address the safeguarding of information in certain sectors, other standards, such as the HITRUST CSF framework, define a wider scope of implementation of information security measures. Considering the level of sensitivity of the information handled in the health care sector, the adoption of a particular information security standard is vital.

Health Care Systems in the UK

The National Health Service (NHS) offers the majority of health care in the United Kingdom. In several ways, the National Health Service signifies a command answer to the issue of apportioning health care. The state in UK decides the amount of health care to be produced and who can access it aside from directly playing a part in the production of health care services. The majority of medical amenities for example hospitals are the property of the state and the personnel in the National Health Service are hired by the state, directly or as autonomous service providers. Health care in the United Kingdom is nearly entirely funded out of taxes. Ninety eight percent of the funding is provided from general tax revenues. Top Essay Writing Services This, essentially, means that the UK citizens do not choose directly in regards to whether to pay for health care services or the amount to pay. The other side of this is that all health care services except charges for things such as dentistry, eye check, and prescription are provided at no cost and are accessible to all citizens who require it.

Public Goods

Contrary to popular misconceived views, public goods are not “goods offered by the public (by the state). Public goods are at times delivered by the private sector and in the same way at other times; private goods are delivered by the public sector. Pure public goods are distinguished by, firstly, non-rivalry. This means that the cost of broadening the service or offering the good to people is close to or nothing. Top Essay Writing Services Nearly all products and services are rivalries i.e. limited zero sum games. Once they are used, they are spent and are not accessible to other people. Public goods are available to increasing numbers of persons without any extra subsidiary cost. This broad distribution of benefits makes them inappropriate for private enterprises. It is not possible to summon up the full returns they prompt. As Samuelson rightly observed, they are excessive forms of positive overflow effects (1954).

Secondly, public goods are characterized by non-excludability (Samuelson & Nordhaus, 2001), i.e. it is unattainable to prohibit anyone from taking advantage of the benefits of a public good, or from defraying its expenditure, both the positive and negative overflow effects. In the same manner, no one can willingly eliminate himself or herself from their remit. Thirdly, public goods are characterized by externalities. This means that public goods inflict costs or benefits on other persons, individually or as a group (e.g. firms); exterior to the market and their outcomes are only partly mirrored in prices and the marketplace dealings. As Musgrave pointed out (1969), externalities are one of the facets of non-rivalry. Top Essay Writing Services Examples of public goods include state defense, lighthouses, the GPS navigation system, dams, vaccination programs, among others.

Public goods are not offered or funded inevitably by public institutions and agencies. However, states regularly intervene to turn around market malfunctions i.e., when the marketplace do not offer goods and services or to diminish operation costs to augment use or provision and, hence, positive externalities. States, for example, provide preventive care and fund education since this has a general positive public outcome. However, there are no pure public goods, with the exclusion of state defense.

Is Healthcare a Public Good?

Top Essay Writing Services In the past, healthcare was a private good with positive spillover effects. With the advent of technology and state generosity, this is not the case anymore. Healthcare is being changed into a non-pure public good. Hypothetically, healthcare, in all forms, is principally exclusionary. It is unattainable to leave out a person from the upshots of his nation’s state security, or those of his locality’s dam. However, it is entirely possible to leave out patients from admittance to healthcare. This limitation, though, is not only applicable to healthcare. It also applicable to other goods generally accepted as public. For example, it is feasible to leave out a person or a group of people from being educated or from attending at a public recital in the square. Public goods necessitate a primary investment by the consumer. As such, the non-exclusion rule, as posited by Musgrave in 1959, is not universally applicable. For instance, one has to own a radio or television set to profit from the weather forecasts (this would directly have a tendency to exclude the destitute and the poor.

It is even imaginable to offer the benefits of state defense selectively and to leave out parts of the residents, as the Second World War demonstrated to a few marginalized people all too well. In the same manner, user-charges are necessary to profit from some categories of healthcare. Similarly, pure non-rivalry is impossible – at least not concurrently, as Musgrave opined (1959 and 1969). The world is limited and so is all in it (the rule of scarcity). The economic rule of scarcity is universal, public goods are not exempted. Top Essay Writing Services Only a lighthouse and a finite number of citizens that can be defended by a finite army or police can direct a finite number of vessels. This is known as “crowding” and leads to the exclusion of latent recipients or beneficially of the service or good.
Non-rivalry and non-excludability are not certainties; rather, they are standards. They only pertain purely to the sunshine. Even the air, as environmentalists warn, is a limited good. Technology steadily has helped make many goods and services such as books and education asymptotically non-rivalry and non-excludable.

Considerable study demonstrates that improving value, effectiveness, and equity significantly is dependent on encouraging policy milieu and policy dealings, and state capability to execute policy efficiently. Mills et al. (2001) posits the following as the most significant. The first is decentralizing the maintenance of returns to offer enticements to collect fees and to permit local enhancements in value. The second is installing the information systems for fiscal management that hold up administration at all tiers. Fiscal administration skills, particularly at sub-national tiers, where returns are managed, are also critical.

The forth is a well-motivated personnel with an objective financial motivation that promotes the adoption of flesh charging and administration practices but dampen overenthusiastic or illegitimate charging. Top Essay Writing Services A well-planned and suitable immunity system, with details that allow the target faction to be accessed is also significant. The fifth is a central management, education, and direction on executing immunity policy and utilizing returns. The sixth is the need for maintaining state subsidy levels to guarantee that fee proceeds are supplementary and can be utilized to progress value and encourage personnel. The last is the readiness of the public and their capacity to pay.

Levels of Spending

The amount of spending on health care in the United Kingdom has sharply risen from the latter years of the 1990s, both absolutely and in relation to Gross Domestic Product (Sutherland & Coyle, 2009). Healthcare expenditure, which was a sum of 60 billion pounds in 1998, climbed to an approximated 142 billion pounds in 2009 (Sutherland & Coyle, 2009). With the pace of development exceeding the increase in ostensible Gross Domestic Product (principally in 2009 when the economy of the United Kingdom tapered stridently), healthcare expenditure proportion of GDP rose from 6.9 percent in 1998 to an approximated 10.1 percent in 2009. This could be mostly a reflection of the government’s policy to improve public services and close down on the earlier gap involving the level of the United Kingdom’s expenditure on health care and the European Union standard (approximately 9 percent of Gross Domestic Product).

In the period between 2009 and 2011, ostensible spending was projected to go on rising over, however, the future for real-term increase is by far not good. Real expenditure was anticipated to rise at a slower rate in comparison to the growth in the period between 2000 and 2008 (Sutherland & Coyle, 2009). Top Essay Writing Services With the United Kingdom facing relentless budgetary limitations, real-term health care spending is estimated to fall in 2012 and beyond, probably at approximately 2 to 3 percent per annum (Sutherland & Coyle, 2009). On the other hand, the requirement for health care services was projected to continue rising during over the period from 2009 and beyond 2012 motivated by a growing and ageing (and ever better learned) populace, fresh medical progresses and additional increase in chronic infections occurrences, chiefly in obesity-related sickness (Sutherland & Coyle, 2009).