Essay On Patient Confidentiality

As the health care system has become more complex, Ongoing advances in technology, including computerized medical databases, telehealth, online payors and other Internet-based technologies, have increased the likelihood of potential and unintentional breaches of private/confidential health information; therefore making it increasingly difficult to protect patient confidentiality. This led Dr. Marc Siegler [University of Chicago] to wonder whether confidentiality had become a decrepit concept, one that had to be reconstructed in the light of changes in the health care system. The concept made sense when the medical relationship was essentially one between the patient and the doctor. But that is not the way things are in present time. It has …show more content…
Modern health care involves teams of specialists—medical, financial, governmental, social, and more—and they all require access to, and dissemination of, a great deal of confidential information about patients. For example, when you are a patient in the emergency room you first give out information in regards to the issue that brought you and personal demographic information. Once that is complete, you then give more information to someone else in regards to insurance and/or credit card information if a payment is required. Just in that short amount of time a person has released their personal information to more than one person, not knowing who overheard etc. due to lack of privacy. Yet, these developments seem to be in response to people's demand for better and more comprehensive care. But they also are changing our traditional concept of medical confidentiality.
Siegler's suggestion is that the moral basis of confidentiality as a moral obligation is in patient benefit; and hence, that information about patients may be shared as much as necessary among health care professionals so long as the sharing is for the benefit of the