Medics posting messages on networking websites like Facebook and Twitter are breaching patient confidentiality, a leading journal reveals.
Research in the Journal of the American Medical Association found examples of web gossip by trainee doctors sharing private patient stories and details.
Over half of 78 US medical schools studied had reported cases of students posting unprofessional content online.
One in 10 of these contained frank violations of patient confidentiality.
Most were blogs, including one on Facebook, containing enough clinical detail that patients could potentially be identified.
Click on this link for the full article.
2 comments:
Reading this article has been extremely insightful on the precautions medical students and medical professionals need to keep in mind when posting information on the internet regarding clinical experiences. The expanding forums of social networking sites present challenges when abiding by confidentiality laws. Medical professionals and students often forget or discount the public arena of social networking sites. How can this be avoided? Should social networking and confidentiality be a part of the required curriculum for all healthcare professionals?
Hi Rachel, I think that seeing that health care ethics is usually a mandatory course in health care education programs then it should extend to including ethics online.
One Australian researcher Sally Kift states that using online technologies needs to be embedded into the curriculum, not bolted on. At the moment I see a lot of "bolting on" and not enough embedding.
Cheers, Anita
Post a Comment