Patton Fuller

Patton-Fuller Community Hospital

The Patton-Fuller Community Hospital serves the community and maintains responsibility to provide good services and protect all patients’ rights. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have requirements the hospital must meet to ensure all patient’s right and information is being protected at all times. In the hospital, there is a very large amount of Protected Hospital Information (PHI) needing to be protected according to the requirements of HIPAA. The IT department is to store patient’s information electronically and maintain privacy and protection. The IT department at Patton-Fuller Community Hospital currently protects the PHI data by using Advance Encryption Standard (AES). The hospital ensures that all employees have unique usernames and password. The hospital uses the 1000BaseT, but the Radiology department uses the 1000BaseF.

The copper-base standard is suited for the use in the data center because it is currently used in the clinical areas of the hospital like the Labs, Ward, Emergency rooms (ER), doctors’ offices, Operating rooms (OR), Intensive Care Units (ICU), and outpatient examining rooms. The copper wire connection throughout the hospital leaves room for more improvements. The areas using the 1000BaseT network structure include Administrative areas like the Human Resources (HR), Hospital Senior Management, Admitting and Discharge facilities, and IT department. Even though the 1000BaseT is the backbone of the networking structure of the entire hospital, the Radiology department uses the standards of the 1000BaseF. The reason for Radiology to use the 1000BaseF arises from having different requirements to be met. The Radiology department has higher standards to meet due to the Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) protocol. This is to ensure all images can be transmitted and viewed in the Picture Archiving System (PACS). Before the images can be viewed and diagnostic condition...