Health Information Technology

Building Trust while Safeguarding Patient Privacy

Privacy is a complex issue. It is complex in the sense that it means different things to different people and in different situations. It is more of a contextual thing. However, in its most plain form, privacy may mean that state of a person being under no any surveillance. When this element topic is trickled down to medical privacy, then the definition of privacy extends to encompass confidentiality and security. This is where collection, storage and even usage of a patient’s information are summed up to define patient’s privacy. Thus, a patient’s privacy refers to the confidentiality and security with which patient’s information is handled with. As can be seen, this involves several parties who are involved in the usage, storage and collection and thus safeguarding that information is important. Therefore, confidentiality involves not disclosing that information to third parties. In addition to this, confidentiality is concerned with how data concerning a certain patient is held and used by the party that collected that information. (Joy L. Pritts, JD) On the other hand, security involves institution of measures that regulate how that information is handled by whichever party that comes across it. This involves both administrative and technological measures that are put in place to ensure no unauthorized access of information. How the information is collected, stored and used determines the trust build.

Trust is similar to privacy when it comes to its complexity. It is the element that carries the value for privacy. People share pertinent information with others because the trust they have. For example in a free market, the exchange takes place solely because of the trust among...

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... unfortunately, these are not covered under the HIPAA. They are regulated by common rule. As noted earlier common rules capitalize mostly on the consent and confidentiality of the patient’s personal information. This is because the patient needs to be protected against any harm in the biomedical trials. The increasing database storage is turning the research from relying on the patients directly, but rather concentrating on the records available for the studies. However, this aspect is not clearly featured in the Common Rule and hence the concern of privacy and trust of the handling the information comes in. introduction of the HIPAA rules brings some cohesion in this sector. This is because there is now a definition of circumstances on which a patient’s information may be shared to researchers. Subsequent regulations have only been building on HIPAA privacy rules.