Scenario

You are the Chief Executive Officer [CEO] of a health services organization.  This organization has inpatient and outpatient facilities, home healthcare services, and other services that meet your patient population’s needs.  It also has a world-renowned AIDS treatment center.  The organization has always enjoyed an excellent reputation and its quality of care is known to be excellent. 

Unfortunately, your organization has recently been featured in every media vehicle known to man.  The reason: Someone downloaded the names of 4,000 HIV+ patients seen in your HIV clinic and posted the list on the Internet.

The Board of Trustees is furious and wants to fire you.  You have been able to convince them that they need to keep you as CEO to fix this major crisis. You hire a computer security consultant who comes into your organization, disguised as a nurse manager.  After three days, she comes to you with the following report.

• Nurses log in to the computer system with their passwords and then walk away, leaving the system open and running.
• Jones leaves his password taped to his PC on a piece of paper.
• Fax machines and printers are in open rooms without locks.
• One password can access the entire database in the hospital including human resources.
• There are no programs reminding staff to change their passwords on a regular basis.
• She pretended to forget her password and other nurses gave her their password.
• She requested sensitive patient files and staff provided her with the files without question.

Assignment Requirements

Your paper should be clear, concise, and 4 double-spaced pages (excluding a title page and a reference page).  Only the first 4 pages of your assignment will be graded, so it is important to be concise in your writing and remain on-topic.

You do not need to provide an abstract or describe any of the details provided above.

You must address the following:

• A brief assessment of the problems that your organization faces from a ‘big picture’ health care management point of view.  This should be a high level overview of the category/categories of problems that your organization currently faces. (1 page maximum)
• An overview of key laws, regulations, and guidelines that are relevant to the scenario.  Be sure to support your assessment with examples of why you believe each law, regulation, and/or guideline is relevant. (1 page maximum)
• The identification of 2 similar situations that have occurred within the health care industry in recent years. A brief explanation of how the identified organizations handled the crisis and an assessment of whether this approach would work for your organization.  (1 page maximum)
• An explanation of how your organization could best handle this crisis. (1 page maximum)

You are required to:

• Utilize a minimum of four references. Resources used to support your findings should use a variety of information types including interviews, expert opinions, journal articles, and newspaper articles. 
• Provide a reference list in APA format.
• Use in-text citations in APA format.