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How privacy considerations drive patient decisions
and impact patient care outcomes
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Fair Warning, Inc. (FWI), an American company, recently
commissioned a survey on how patient privacy considerations
impact the actual delivery of health care and to
what degree patients believed health care executives and
managers should be held accountable for privacy protection
and breaches.
The survey was meant to serve as a baseline for future
surveys and to determine how privacy affects patient
behaviours and influences care outcomes. FWI plans to
commission this survey again in one year to determine if
there have been any changes in attitudes.
There is no doubt that we live in a society that is both
obsessed with having information and is equally obsessed
with privacy of personal information. Governments are
also aware of the high value citizens place on privacy
and this includes health records and personal health information.
This results in a push and pull with regards
to balancing the collection and subsequent protection of
information and allowing for the flow of information between
patients and their health care providers. Appropriate
access to information and privacy are therefore two
concepts that go hand in hand.
Physicians, for the most part, understand that they have
an ethical responsibility to ensure their patients’ privacy.
This certainly isn’t a new concept – it is even spoken
about in the Hippocratic Oath. Then there are the legal
obligations that physicians have under the various Access
to Information and Privacy (ATIP) laws in place in Canada.
In Saskatchewan, the Health Information Protection Act
(HIPA) is one of the main pieces of ATIP legislation that
must be adhered to by physicians.
In their survey, FWI asked more than 1000 respondents
thirty questions that sought to understand the degree to
which Canadian patients’ health care decisions are affected
by privacy. The key findings were as follows:
Trust in the confidentiality of medical records is influencing
when, where, from whom and what kind of medical
treatment is delivered to patients in Canada. These privacy
concerns affect the flow of information to providers
to use in the diagnosis and care of their patients. The results
of the survey indicated that 43.2 per cent of patients
would withhold information from their care providers
based on privacy concerns. Nearly 43 per cent stated
they would seek care outside of their community due to
privacy concerns, with 33.7 per cent indicating that they
would travel 50 kilometers or more in order to keep their
sensitive information confidential. By withholding medical
information, Canadian patients are impacting the care
they receive.
The article also indicates that hat 61.9 per cent
of Canadian patients reported ed that if there
were serious or repeated breaches reaches of patients’
personal information n at a hospital
where they had treatment, ent, it would
reduce their confidence in the quality of
the health care offered there. ere. The survey
summary does indicate that more research
is needed to fully understand nderstand the
impact of privacy breaches on health
care outcomes, but acknowledges edges
that when information is withheld
or falsified, treatments nts
are impacted.
A major part of the survey ey
focused on patients’ exxpectations
that health care re
providers and hospital exececutives aggressively protect patient
privacy. In fact, the survey urvey
found that more than four out of
five Canadian patients stated ed that,
if a health care executive knowingnowingly failed to act to reduce the he risk
of breach and a breach occurred, curred,
they should be fined or fired. ed. Sixty-nine
and a half per cent stated
that there should be a public lic listing
hosted by the government nment
that lists which hospitals have ave had
breaches of patient health records.
Aside from the hospital’s reputareputa- SMA News Digest Spring 2012 19