Rob Hosking wrote: > Update. > Since I have communicated with Mr Oppey at the Austin he has had further > communication from others (notably the AMA) who were concerned about the > Austin's approach of using unencrypted e-mails to GPs. He was taking > these concerns back to the Privacy committee of the Austin and was > reinvestigating encryption options. > > Others on the list have stated that we should not discourage health > professionals sending e-mails to us if not encrypted by saying we are > not legally liable. Maybe so, but I feel I have a duty to protect my > patients from all manner of bad practice when it comes to their health > issues. If I am aware of poor standards being practised on my patients > then I should do what I can, as a patient advocate, to avoid that. This > extends to communication from hospitals. I have complained to hospital > managements many times about poor quality and poorly timed discharge > information and I will continue to do so. Likewise, I will not receive > e-mails unencrypted from other health professionals in order to protect > my patients' privacy. You may not be liable, but your patient may suffer > a bad outcome as a result of receiving sensitive information in > unencrypted e-mails. > Rob
I have a slightly different take on this issue. Whenever I receive unencrypted clinical information I thank the sender, noting how much more efficient and safer that makes care for the patient, the GP and other providers. I do go on to point out that we should really encrypt this information for the purpose of protecting the patient's privacy and suggest, if they like, I will send my little man round to install a CaCert certificate for them. The upshot is that about 30% get certificates and 70% no longer send me data. So we ensure privacy at the cost of worse health care. It's a pyrrhic victory. David _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
