The informatics nurse is involved with measures to protect security and confidentiality of patient data because:

• A. Joint Commission standard
• B. HIPAA legislation
• C. the major cause of security breaches is human error
• D. both HIPAA legislation and human error

Answer: (D)

Protecting patient data rests on both fulfilling legal obligations and addressing how breaches most often happen in practice. HIPAA requires specific privacy and security protections for protected health information, including safeguards across administrative, technical, and physical domains, as well as clear rules for how data can be accessed, stored, transmitted, and disclosed. But many breaches occur because of human factors—carelessness or mistakes such as weak passwords, sharing credentials, sending information to the wrong person, or losing a device. Because these human-error-driven risks are so common, the measures put in place must both satisfy HIPAA requirements and specifically target reducing human error through training, clear policies, access controls, authentication, and incident response. That combination explains why the best answer points to both HIPAA legislation and human error as drivers of security and confidentiality efforts.