Your response should be in paragraph format, reflect critical thought, and demonstrate your understanding of concepts through reference to personal and/or professional experiences, anecdotes, historical facts, and/or newsworthy events that strengthen your argument(s) or illustrate points. This is for a graduate legal class for Legal Aspects for Health Information Management. Please answer the following questions at the end: Additional Assigned Readings (not included on syllabus) Hall, J. L., & McGraw, D. (2014). For telehealth to succeed, privacy and security risks must be identified and addressed. Health Affairs, 33(2), 216–221 The textbook chapter for this unit highlights many security issues, especially risks associated with portable media/devices and off-site access to electronic protected health information (ePHI) through EHRs. Where might a security breach occur under seemingly innocent circumstances? Consider an employee who brings his or her laptop computer to a coffee shop and excuses himself or herself to use the restroom without taking measures to shield the contents of the laptop screen from passersby. Provide a real-world example of security risk to ePHI, and suggest at least one way in which the risk of a security breach could be minimized in your example Electronic sharing of ePHI among providers, hospitals, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a capability known as “interoperability,” is just the first step in a coordinated effort to make EHRs the industry standard. In fact, CMS has promulgated regulations related to meaningful use of EHRs, breaking the development of the initiative into three stages: Stage 1 consisted of providers and hospitals implementing an EHR and integrating it into daily practice; Stage 2 required providers to implement and use “patient portals,” which are EHR products that allow providers to communicate directly with patients in an electronic medium; Stage 3 involved connecting to a health information exchange (HIE) and actually sharing data through EHRs with other relevant entities. CMS offered providers payment incentives up to $45,000 for early adoption and implementation of EHRs according to the guidelines for each stage. To encourage compliance for those ineligible or uninterested in pursuing incentive monies, CMS will impose reimbursement penalties on Medicare providers who do not comply. Clearly, providers and healthcare entities have incentives to upgrade their EHR and other computer technology to better protect patient confidentiality and prevent breach. As the trend towards greater integration of emerging medical technologies into healthcare delivery continues, our use and dependence on telemedicine must grow. Bearing in mind the points raised in the Telemedicine article, please respond to each of the following: – Summarize the privacy and security threats that have been major obstacles to the growth of telemedicine – Do you see parallels between these and other federally driven health initiatives, like EHRs, and the corresponding regulatory schemes that provoke positive change with regard to minimizing the risk of security breach? How might the government – state or federal – push for change in a legislative sense? What public policy reasons could justify doing so? What impact on the quality and/or continuity of care might an increase in the development and administration of telemedicine entail? – What about patient resistance to telemedicine, since it would fundamentally alter the accepted structure of the patient encounter? Do you think people might view telemedicine and its associated products or tools as intrusive or a violation of privacy? Or would they be encouraged by greater access to specialized care? Explain your answer