PRACTICE PARTNER
The Inquiries, Complaints and Reports Committee identifies clinical
or practice issues it sees that may be of educational value to the
profession. The composite narratives are derived from information
the Committee reviews, with clinical points distilled. The Committee welcomes feedback and dialogue.
Ensuring Confidentiality of Health Information
Consider the following four
scenarios:
dictates that patients be made aware
of the inherent privacy risk of using
email to communicate health information and provide consent. In
an attempt to provide guidance to
physicians wading into the waters
of ever-changing modes of communication, the CMPA has provided
a written consent form that can be
used wherever possible.
1. r. Smith receives an email which
D
reads “I’ve had to leave the country urgently, can you please send
the biopsy results to this email
address?”
2. n the middle of making an
I
appointment with a patient,
an administrator steps away to
confer with the nurse, leaving said
patient’s chart.
3. n a busy family practice, a doctor
I
leaves his exam room door open
when he sees a patient who was
recently charged with assault. A
few hours after the appointment,
the police come by the doctor’s
office and want to know what the
patient was seen for.
4. he phone rings and it is the
T
mother of a 25-year-old man with
schizophrenia who is currently in
the emergency department on a
form-1. She is in tears, begging
for an update on the status of her
child.
Maintaining confidentiality is fundamental to providing the highest
standard of patient care. One of the
most important ways physicians
can help to establish and preserve
trust in the doctor-patient relationship is to ensure and promote confidence that the patient’s personal
health information will remain
confidential. When such confidence
exists, patients are often much more
likely to provide complete and accurate health information, which
in turn, leads to better treatment
advice and hopefully, ultimately
better outcomes.
Moreover, in order to truly comply
with our legal and professional obligation, physicians must examine
all modes of communication from
the perspective of maintaining the
confidentiality of those who entrust
us with their care.
Scenario 1
While it has always been important
to maintain confidentiality, new
technologies have made this both
more complicated and perhaps
more imperative. For anyone who
has hit ‘Reply-All’ in error, the
speed with which information can
be distributed to the wrong people
is impressive. As a consequence, the
CPSO’s Confidentiality of Personal Health Information policy
A physician should also exercise
judgment. If there is reason to
suspect that the sender of a message
is not the patient, as may be the
case in the first scenario described
above, due diligence would dictate that the recipient of the email
earnestly attempt to contact the
patient in another manner prior to
sending personal health information into the ether.
Scenario 2
Medical records are such a fundamental part of our everyday lives it
can be easy to lose sight of the sensitive nature of each and every one.
An una