Privacy has always been one of the essential concerns of all individuals regardless of a country or culture. Privacy is considered to be one of the most important civil rights. Today, the issue of privacy concerns is especially relevant due to the high prevalence of communication technologies in everyday life. Practically, a large amount of information is shared on a daily basis including personal and, sometimes, confidential data. In that way, the private information of members of the general public can be leaked causing a breach of privacy. In response to this type of risk, many organisations (including the ones operating in the healthcare industry) strengthen their digital security and follow the regulations formulated specifically in order to prevent the violations of privacy. This paper provides the review of a scenario involving the violation of HIPAA regulation in reference to a celebrity patient.
HIPAA, Ethical, and Legal Concerns of the Use of Smartphones and Social Media in Healthcare
HIPAA or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was first introduced in 1996 and then amended in 2000 and 2002 for the purpose to protect the electronic health records of the patients (Celebrity Electronic Health Records Privacy, 2015). Under this Act, the patients are the ones in control of the release of their private medical information; in other words, the medical practitioners are prohibited from publishing this type of data without the patients’ consent. However, there are still occasions when the information protected by HIPAA is leaked to various public sources; this tendency especially concerns the celebrity patients whose private data is a matter of interest of the general public.
As specified by Denecke et al. (2015), “social media are digital media and technologies that enable users to exchange information and to create media content individually or in community with others” (p. 137). The popularity of these media has been growing rapidly in the healthcare settings, and in that way, today, most healthcare practitioners, as well as their patients, are the active users of different communication technologies and social networks. As a result, it is a necessity that all the medical practitioners are familiar with the regulations enforced by HIPAA and adhere to them protecting the patients’ anonymity and confidentiality regardless of their social status. The benefits of EHRs and EMRs over the paper records is that nobody can view them without leaving a trace; however, the heavy presence of the communication technologies in all kinds of medical organisations inevitably leads to the leakages of confidential information of the celebrity patients to social media and the press that can be accomplished via hacks, breaches, losses, or theft of the confidential data (Kaplan, 2014).
When it comes to the medical settings, the patients have no other choice but to disclose their private information in order to obtain high-quality services; in that way, it is a matter of ethics and law for the healthcare institutions to secure this data. The problem is that as the technologies advance, so do their uses, and as a result, they can be applied in a new and unconventional ways and cause the forms of privacy violations that have not been addressed by the policies yet (Kaplan, 2014). This particularly refers to the cases when the patient’s information collected for the provision of medical treatment is used for the other purposes.
Scenario
The situation described in the scenario involves a public person – Jerod, a well-known musician who arrived at the hospital unconscious after a car accident. As a nurse, I have access to his private information, and I unknowingly abuse it by taking pictures of the celebrity unconscious and undressed, as well as of his personal information (home address, phone number, and demographic information I can see on his EHR). Analysing these actions, it is important to note that they qualify as the acts of “intrusion on a person’s affairs or seclusion in a nonpublic setting involving acts objectionable to a reasonable person” (Burkle & Cascino, 2011, p. 1193). In other words, taking pictures of the unconscious celebrity and his confidential electronic health record are the violations of tort law under the legal theory of the invasion of privacy. My behaviour is punishable by law under the regulations of HIPAA once it becomes known to the legal authorities.
For the completion of this paper, my task was to choose one of four endings to the scenario. I chose the first scenario where the nurse from the following day shift finds the smartphone of the previous nurse left unattended and gets access to Jerod’s information and pictures. This scenario is likely to result in the privacy intrusion moving further and turning into another form of tort law violation – the public disclosure of the celebrity’s private data (Burkle & Cascino, 2011). In other words, the day shift nurse could easily sell the pictures to the press; after that, the singer will become aware of the violation and decide to sue the hospital for the breach of privacy causing an investigation that will inevitably lead to the night shift staff and the practitioners who had access to the singer’s EHR. The nurse who sold the pictures might remain without punishment, but the one who took them in the first place will definitely be exposed.
Lessons Learned
Many useful lessons were learned with the help of researching and reading the materials exploring the ethical and legal sides of privacy violations in the healthcare settings. For instance, it is known that the right to privacy is one of the constitutional concepts applied to all the individuals without exceptions. In order to empower the patients and protect their right to privacy there exist tort laws whose primary function is to award compensations to the individuals affected by the privacy violations for damages that they caused and to deter medical practitioners from breaking the law in the future (Burkle & Cascino, 2011). Moreover, the acts of invasion of privacy are included in torts and, in particular, include such actions as the intrusion, appropriation, false light, and the disclosure of one’s private information to the public (Burkle & Cascino, 2011).
Advantages and Disadvantages
To sum up, the advantages of the use of smartphones in the medical settings involve easy and fast communication between the professional, and the benefits for the patients when the technology is used for such activities as monitoring of pain, medication management, and self-management for the patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes (Denecke et al., 2015). At the same time, smartphones may present risks serving the potential instruments for privacy violations (pictures of personal records leaked to the press or social networks), and as the sources of technical interference as they produce frequencies that can adversely affect some pieces of medical equipment such as a syringe pump placed close to a smartphone (Hans & Kapadia, 2008).
References
Burkle, C. & Cascino, G. (2011). Medicine and the media: Balancing the public’s right to know with the privacy of the patient. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 86(12), 1192-1196.
Celebrity Electronic Health Records Privacy. (2015). Web
Denecke, K., Bamidis, P., Bond, C., Gabarron, E., Househ, M., & Lau, A., … Hansen, M. (2015). Ethical issues of social media usage in healthcare. IMIA Yearbook, 10(1), 137-147.
Hans, N. & Kapadia, F. N. (2008). Effects of mobile phone use on specific intensive care unit devices. Indian Journal of Critical Care Medicine, 12(4): 170–173.
Kaplan, B. (2014). Patient health data privacy. Web.