The Consequences of Smart Phone Use in the Modern Medical World
NR 360 Unit 3 We Can, But Dare We (RUA)
Name of Student
Chamberlain College of Nursing
Date Submitted
, Smart Phone Use in the Modern Medical World
According to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), as of October 2015, over 120,000
potential Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) violations had been
reported (HHS, 2015). Of those cases, almost 24,000 resulted in changes to privacy practices as
well as almost 23 million dollars in damages to various parties. Numbers like these are not only
astounding, but intolerable. Patient confidentiality must be safeguarded at all costs, and it is the
duty of all medical professionals to honor their commitment to protecting their patients. This
holds especially true for the profession of nursing, where the members are first and foremost a
patient’s primary advocate. The changing social climate and monumental leaps in technology do
not alleviate the nurse from this responsibility; if anything, it forces them to walk a higher path in
regards to balancing the use of new technology and maintaining patient safety and
confidentiality. The problem is that the increase in medical tools and programs available is
directly linked to the increase in Smartphone and social media users, and far too many of these
users blur the lines between their personal and professional lives when utilizing such technology
resulting in HIPAA violations and unacceptable breaches in patient confidentiality. This is not to
say that all technology is evil and that the medical profession should refuse to incorporate these
changes into daily activities. Quite the contrary; efforts should always be made to grow as
individuals and professionals by utilizing all means possible to provide a higher level of care and
safety for patients. To that end, it is very difficult to deny the vast benefits now available for the
medical community by having easy access to a multitude of programs and applications that
increase timeliness, accuracy, and effectiveness of patient care.
It would be unreasonable to condemn all the advances in Smartphone technology as well
as social media. It has brought the world together in ways that would have only been thought of
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