4 Responses 02/27

Actual work where 2 students given their post on this:

Work #1:

Discuss in 500 words, how much redaction is necessary to anonymize an electronic health record. Is it enough to redact the name? The name and address? Is a medical record like a finger print?

Use at least three sources. Use the 

Research Databases available from the Danforth Library

, not Google.   Include at least 3 quotes from your sources enclosed in quotation marks and cited in-line by reference to your reference list.  Example: “words you copied” (citation) These quotes should be one full sentence not altered or paraphrased. Cite your sources using APA format. Use the quotes in your paragaphs.

Write in essay format not in bulleted, numbered or other list format. 

Reply to two classmates’ posting in a paragraph of at least five sentences by asking questions, reflecting on your own experience, challenging assumptions, pointing out something new you learned, offering suggestions. These peer responses are not ‘attaboys’. 

It is important that you use your own words, that you cite your sources, that you comply with the instructions regarding length of your post and that you reply to two classmates in a substantive way (not ‘nice post’ or the like).  Your goal is to help your colleagues write better. Do not use spinbot or other word replacement software. It usually results in nonsense and is not a good way to learn anything. I will not spend a lot of my time trying to decipher nonsense. Proof read your work or have it edited. Find something interesting and/or relevant to your work to write about. 

Work #2:

Discussion Board – Cost Theory

After reading the article “Adding Value in Nike’s Production Line” and watching the “Behind Nike Flyprint and Zoom Series – Next Level Innovation,”research your favorite brand of shoes (Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, New Balance, etc) and answer the following questions: Has the company experienced decreased or increased cost attributed to computerization? Were variable cost increased or decreased? Were fixed cost increased or decreased.

Please find the attachments.

Chandini Work:

Costs are very important in business decision-making. Cost of production provides the floor to pricing. It helps managers to take correct decisions, such as what price to quote, whether to place a particular order for inputs or not whether to abandon or add a product to the existing product line and so on. Ordinarily, costs refer to the money expenses incurred by a firm in the production process. But in economics, the cost is used in a broader sense. Here, costs include the imputed value of the entrepreneur’s own resources and services, as well as the salary of the owner-manager (Frennea, Han, & Mittal, 2019).

 

Money costs are the total money expenses incurred by a firm in producing a commodity. They include wages and salaries of labour; the cost of raw materials; expenditures on machines and equipment; depreciation and obsolescence charges on machines; buildings and other capital goods; rent on buildings; interest on capital borrowed; expenses on power, light, fuel, advertisement and transportation; insurance charges, and all types of taxes (Kdumont, 2018). There are the accounting costs that an entrepreneur takes into consideration in making payments to the various factors of production. These money costs are also known as explicit costs that an accountant records in the firm’s books. But there are other types of economic costs called implicit costs. Implicit costs are the imputed value of the entrepreneur’s own resources and services.

 

The total costs of production of a firm are divided into total variable costs and total fixed costs. The total variable costs are those expenses of production which change with the change in the firm’s output. Larger output requires larger inputs of labour, raw materials, power; fuel, etc. which increase the expenses of production. When the output is reduced, variable costs also diminish. They cease when production stops altogether. Marshall called these variable costs prime costs of production.

 

The variable costs of the company were increased due to an increase in the production of shoes. The production volume of the Nike company is very high, and it has been enhanced by the continuous production of many shoes that are on-demand (Wiener, 2021). Some of the variable costs that the company incurs include the costs of packaging and raw materials. Variable costs fluctuate when production and sales volume variance. It goes up when the production level rise. By computerization, the production level of Adidas rises, which increases variable cost. Fixed costs are investments that remain constant regardless of a company’s production volume.

 

Reference:

 

Frennea, C., Han, K., & Mittal, V. (2019). Value Appropriation and Firm Shareholder Value: Role of Advertising and Receivables Management. Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), 56(2), 291–309. 

https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243718822506

 

Kdumont. (2018, November 13). Adding Value In Nike’s Production Line. The digital Initiative, The Harvard Business School.

 

Wiener, A. (2021, February 26). Inside Adidas’ Robot-Powered, On-Demand Sneaker Factory. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from 

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-speedfactory-adidas-robot-powered-sneaker-factory/

Mounika Work:

Computerization is the act of performing, processing, storing, or controlling through the use of an electronic computer. To computerize something is to essentially make it electronic. To computerize is to make use of computers. Among many industries which are benefitted by computerization, show industry is one of them. They contribute towards speed, consistency, cost savings, reduction of workplace hazards etc.,

            New Balance uses automation widely and one of the early adapters of the technology which helped them to be competitive. The automated embroidery selection programs they use on their custom product lines allow them to quickly change thread colors. Other technologies help them automate the steps of attaching the molded bottom portion of a shoe to the soft upper portion. Over the past three years, they have been implementing a digitized system for tracking defects on the production line. They are also using 3D foot scanning in select global retail locations to give the customers an enhanced fit experience. 3D printing, which is heavily used is especially valuable for making parts of customized footwear, such as plates—the molded part at the bottom of an athletic shoe that may have cleats or spikes—and cushioning materials, such as midsoles. With all these benefits from computerization, it has been implemented widely over the industry. Industries are inclined towards spending more towards setting up computerization because of its enormous benefits. Thus, New Balance has experienced increased costs which are attributed to computerization.

            The variable costs increased because the production of shoes increased, and computerization made sure it will be high always. On the other hand, the need for labor, which is also a variable cost, decreased as the computers did the work. When coming to fixed costs, they reduced because how many ever number of shoes the company produced, the cost for the machinery stayed the same and indeed that reduces the per unit price as the number of units increase the number, the share of the fixed costs is shared among the number of pairs.

References

 

Lukic, V. (2021, January 08). How new balance is bringing industry 4.0 to shoemaking. Retrieved February 26, 2021, from https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2017/operations-lean-manufacturing-new-balance-bringing-industry-4-shoemaking

Solereview. (2017, November 04). Robotics in footwear manufacturing is old news. here’s why:. Retrieved February 26, 2021, from https://www.solereview.com/robotics-in-footwear-manufacturing-is-old-news/

Preethi Work:

“The advancement of health information technology has made it possible for healthcare institutions to have a great deal of information about patients” (Sweeney, von Loewenfeldt, & Perry, 2018). Ensuring that only authorized individuals can be able to access this information is however a challenge due to the many different people that can have access to these records. The existence of laws that require healthcare institution to maintain confidentiality when dealing with patient data, however, means that measures need to be put in place by healthcare institutions that will ensure confidentiality is maintained when dealing with patient data. A key way through which this can be achieved is through redaction that anonymizes patient identities.

Legal rules on the confidentiality of health data do not state the type of patient data that may need to be anonymized in case health records are shared with third parties in the healthcare system. Generally, personal information that can be used to identify a patient is the data is most likely targeted by confidentiality laws. The healthcare data that is contained in a database is usually classified into two categories, direct identifiers that can be used to identify an individual and quasi identifies that cannot directly identify a patient but may give an indication of who they are. A key detail that can be redacted from patient data in order to make it anonymous is the name of the patient. The reductions of personal information about a patient can significantly aid in maintaining their anonymity in healthcare records that may be viewed by unauthorized parties. Key details about the patient such as the address date of visit other than the year, the geographical location can be redacted in health records as a way of protecting their identities, but at the same time, critical records about their treatment can be maintained so as to ensure their health records have some utility.

 

An effective strategy that can be used to ensure personal information contained in health records cannot be accessed by third parties is the replacement of existing patient information with random information, while still ensuring that the health records have some utility to users that may need them in a healthcare setting. This ensuring that patient information remains useful after reduction is of key importance in health records management, as useful information that can be used to improve the quality of healthcare will still be available to practitioners while protecting the identity of individual patients. “This means obfuscation of patient data needs to be carried out in ways that maintain as much information as possible that can be useful for practitioners while at the same time ensuring personal details are eliminated from health records” (Kayaalp, 2018).

An effective method that can be used to ensure patient data is protected but useful information is still available is value enumeration. Patient data that is contained in a structured database is analyzed is value enumeration that aids in the identification of crucial information that may be needed by practitioners and personal data that needs to be redacted. As a result, obfuscation is done in the right way that protects patient identities but still ensures that useful information is maintained. It is important for healthcare institutions to take deliberate measures meant to protect patient data, as is required by law. “The redaction of electronic health records is an effective way through which this can be achieved” (Hassan, Sánchez, Soria-Comas & Domingo-Ferrer, 2019, August). Using this method, all personal details relating to a patient ate redacted from existing records, but clinical information may be retained for use by other practitioners.

 
 

References

Hassan, F., Sánchez, D., Soria-Comas, J., & Domingo-Ferrer, J. (2019, August). Automatic Anonymization of Textual Documents: Detecting Sensitive Information via Word Embeddings. In 2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE) (pp. 358-365). IEEE.

Kayaalp, M. (2018). Patient privacy in the era of big data. Balkan medical journal, 35(1), 8.

Sweeney, L., von Loewenfeldt, M., & Perry, M. (2018). Saying it’s Anonymous Doesn’t Make It So: Re-identifications of “anonymized” law school data. Technology Science.

Sravani Work:

Data Redaction

Data protection at different levels is important. Depending on the type of data redaction levels needs to be increased. Data redaction is a data masking technique that enables you to mask data by removing or substituting all or part of the field value. This helps protect sensitive personally identifying data (Bernstein, 2021). Some of the well-known redaction techniques are full, partial, & lookup which involves replacing actual data with constant values, replacing actual data with dummy or alias values, replacing actual data with crosswalk values etc. Data redaction works out most of the time with great efficiency but need to be careful when using because it is not easily reversible i.e. reverse lookup is not simple. Some of use cases of data redaction are masking date of birth, social security number, credit card number, diagnoses codes in health care records etc.

How much redaction is necessary to anonymize an electronic health record?

Level of redaction is also important when implementing data redaction techniques. Electronic health record (EHR) is a significant data record which needs to be redacted to maximum possible level because it is considered as a fingerprint for any individual. It is important to redact name, address, social security number, diagnoses details etc. Electronic medical records (EMR) have largely replaced hand-written patient files in healthcare. The growing pool of EMR data presents a significant resource in medical research, but the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates redacting medical records before performing any analysis on the same. This process complicates obtaining medical data and can remove much useful information from the record (Polsley et al., 2017). Principle along with a significant rise in HIPAA enforcement, practices must remain sensitive of how they handle the data that’s released to third parties. Redaction of personal information from records is one important way practice administrators can improve security, though it’s not the only way. Automating the removal of PHI by integrating redaction solutions with existing practice technology such as electronic health records searching and removing any protected information becomes electronic, eliminating a manual, repetitive process. Removing risks associated with the release of PHI is possible with automated solutions that can remove data fields like patient name, dates of service, medication lists and other general information in the health record. But even though solutions exist to automate the redaction of protected PHI, most organizations process records manually even as they migrate to electronic systems in other areas (Rasmussen, 2014). Data redaction will help EHR in multiple ways like creating audit workflows, making patient lab records available to providers with ease, reducing wait time in accessing reports, structuring lab results to support meaningful use, better management of incoming paper-based labs, etc.

References

Bernstein, D. (2021, January 02). Data Redaction: What It Is and When to Use It. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from https://www.privitar.com/blog/data-redaction-what-it-is-and-when-to-use-it/

Polsley, S., Tahir, A., Raju, M., Akinleye, A., & Steward, D. (2017). Role-Preserving Redaction of Medical Records to Enable Ontology-Driven Processing. BioNLP 2017. doi:10.18653/v1/w17-2324

Rasmussen, D. (2014, May 9). Electronic Health Reporter. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from https://electronichealthreporter.com/keeping-an-eye-on-redaction-and-data-automation-why-its-important-to-small-practices/

What is Least Privilege Access? PoLP Explained. (n.d.). Retrieved February 11, 2021, from https://www.cyberark.com/what-is/least-privilege/