Ian Cheong wrote: > At 4:33 pm +1000 11/7/06, David Guest wrote: >> [...] >> >> So we ensure privacy at the cost of worse health care. It's a pyrrhic >> victory. >> >> David >> > > I agree. > > The privacy risk is a non-issue if patients agree to accept the risk in > the interests of quality care.
As long as it is *informed* consent. My view is that it needs to be explained to patients thus: "We will be sending your medical details contained in a discharge summary to your GP via unencrypted email, which is like the electronic version of writing on the back of a postcard and sending it without an envelope through Australia Post, except that what we will be doing offers less privacy protection than a postcard because computers owned by third parties (but we don't know who they are) can automatically read and make copies of the information as the information passes through them. You need to balance such privacy concerns against the fact that by sending the information via unencrypted email, your GP may receive the information more rapidly than otherwise, which may improve your care, although we could also fax the information which probably has a similar effect on your care and provides better protection for your privacy but may be less convenient for your GP to file away and is more hassle for us to send. And there is a much better system called encrypted email that both protects your privacy and has the advantages of speed and filing/storage convenience, but we failed to manage to arrange to do that although others have succeeded. So, do you consent?" Also, remember that the law works on a case-by-case basis, not on a law of averages. Thus, although in the aggregate the sending hospital or the receiving GP may decide that having discharge summaries sooner via unencrypted email outweighs the threat to privacy, there will still be cases in which the timeliness of the discharge summary has no positive effect on the quality of the patient's care but the loss of privacy or threat of loss of privacy is has a large negative impact. The lawyers can still have a field day with that case, even though there may be dozens or hundreds of others in which the opposite is true. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
