Legal Issues Concerning Electronic Health Information

Abstract

Personally identifiable health information about individuals and general medical information is increasingly available in electronic form in health databases and through online networks. The proliferation of electronic data within the modern health information infrastructure presents significant benefits for medical providers and patients, including enhanced patient autonomy, improved clinical treatment, advances in health research and public health surveillance, and modern security techniques. However, it also presents new legal challenges in 3 interconnected areas: privacy of identifiable health information, reliability and quality of health data, and tortbased liability. Protecting health information privacy (by giving individuals control over health data without severely restricting warranted communal uses) directly improves the quality and reliability of health data (by encouraging individual uses of health services and communal uses of data), which diminishes tort-based liabilities (by reducing instances of medical malpractice or privacy invasions through improvements in the delivery of health care services resulting in part from better quality and reliability of clinical and research data). Following an analysis of the interconnectivity of these 3 areas and discussing existing and proposed health information privacy laws, recommendations for legal reform concerning health information privacy are presented. These include (1) recognizing identifiable health information as highly sensitive, (2) providing privacy safeguards based on fair information practices, (3) empowering patients with information and rights to consent to disclosure (4) limiting disclosures of health data absent consent, (5) incorporating industry-wide security protections, (6) establishing a national data protection authority, and (7) providing a national minimal level of privacy protections.

Information security and privacy in healthcare: current state of research

“…Payer organizations equipped with such statistical monitoring tools for controlling the NAC rate could direct their resources to other necessary services rather than on expensive audits (Rosenberg 2001b (2007) argued for development of -contextual access criteria‖ that could be deployed throughout the national health information network to limit the scope of disclosure. In addition concerted efforts need to be made to provide privacy safeguards based on fair information practices, incorporate industry wide security protection, and establish a national data protection authority (Hodge, et al 1999). …”

Medical informatics on an ongoing road to final destination

“…due to inaccurate data) or privacy invasions (e.g. unauthorized access, modification or disclosure) (4) .…”

Digital Signature Based on DICOM Standards of Medical Image by JAVA (DSMI)

“…During diagnosis and treatment, a series of health records and medical images are generated, stored, transmitted, and withdrawn, so the security of medical information research has become necessary [3].…”