Patient Confidentiality Essay

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 General Introduction

The term security refers to ….

The term confidentiality has been defined in a number of ways by a number of people. Some of those definitions are as follows. Schneider (1996),defines confidentiality as “the ethical, professional and legal obligation of a physician not to disclose what is communicated to him or her in the physician-patient relationship.” There is a common term that is used, and this is the so called a “breach of confidentiality” it refers to, the release of medical information without the patient’s consent and without legal necessity or legal authorization for the release .

Taitz (1992) also defines confidentiality as the, “duty cast upon a medical practitioner, by reason of

This prompted or led the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences in United States of America and a non-profit organization, to publish a report entitled “The Computer-Based Patient Record” in 1991, which speaks at length on the critical importance of safeguarding patient data. It is said that, the digital age has progressed and is still progressing so rapidly and in 1997, it was found that there was a need for a revised edition of the report and it was published to highlight advances in CPR’s (Computer-based patient records), in which confidentiality is re-stressed by Dick, Steen, and Detmer (1997). Again due to the importance of this issue, the Institute of Medicine went one step further in 2000, publishing a report entitled “Protecting Data Privacy in Health Services Research.” In the report, it was noted that, the Institute made recommendations to the various entities in the healthcare industry about their treatment of sensitive data. One typical example is recommendation number 3-6, which states that healthcare organizations “that disclose or use personally identifiable health information for any purpose ... should have comprehensive policies, procedures and other structures to protect the confidentiality of health information” (Dick et al.,