[Re: https://www.hifa.org/dgroups-rss/mhealth-innovate-56-strategies-protect-... ]
Thanks to Richard Fitton for sharing his experience (in the UK) of Role Based Access Control cards, whereby health professionals are only given access to personal medical records when they have successfully completed a national data protection course.
This provides guidance on protecting patient privacy and confidentiality with regards to existing personal medical records. It seems the guidance is designed particularly to ensure that if a health worker has access to a patient's personal medical records, they should not disclose any details to others inappropriately.
Such guidance provides part of 'strategies to protect patient confidentiality'. In relation to the current discussion, which is primarily on the use of personal mobile phones for work purposes, the guidance relates to how health workers might handle data from online medical records, but does not provide for other common situations, such as text exchanges between two health workers, where the names and sensitive health information of patients may be exchanged in good faith to support immediate clinical needs of the patient. It is easy to see how sensitive information may be divulged in such circumstances, whether deliberately or by accident, to persons who are not authorised to see it.
Once a text exchange has taken place on a personal mobile phone, that information may stay on the phone for an indefinite period, with potential for breach of confidentiality at any time. It would be interesting to learn examples of such breaches in different countries and contexts. If you know of any examples, please send here: hifa@hifaforums.org
It can be argued that the only way to eliminate breaches of privacy and confidentiality via personal mobile phone use is to ban the use of personal mobile phones for work purposes entirely. This is the position of the Royal College of Nursing (UK) who published a policy statement on this issue in 2016. I shall say more about this in my next message.
Clearly, banning the use of personal mobile phones for work purposes is not feasible or desirable for many contexts. There is no one-size-fits-all.
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org