Patient privacy “is” important!

Doctors in Nepal have a closed facebook group called Doctors’ Society of Nepal (DSON). It’s a very large group of 14.6k doctors, where lively discussions pertaining to many professional and contemporary issues are discussed.

Recently two of the colleagues in two different posts, shared picture(s) of medical record(s) of their patients. One post, let’s call it post A, was to highlight the shortcomings of medical records by one of the paramedical providers and the other, let’s call it post B, was to seek a second opinion about treatment. These two posts provide a very valuable opportunity to discuss about the ethics of sharing in social media.

In post A, the photo showed the name, age, sex and address of the patient. With those identifying information anyone could tell exactly who the person was. But the most striking thing for me was that by the time of writing, of the 96 comments made on the post, not one objected to the fact that the identifying information was being shared in a social media platform. Being aware of the limitations of drawing inferences from such a small sample, I think it’s safe to say that we might benefit from a refresher course on patient privacy.

And the post B is a perfect example of Patient privacy done right. The colleague sharing the photo wanted a second opinion about antibiotics prescription to her patient. She wanted to share the lab reports of her patient but was aware about respecting and protecting the privacy of her patient. The photos only showed the pertinent lab findings, there were no identifying information whatsoever in the photos. There was no way anybody could link that record to any patient with the information provided.

In general, the best practice is to not use any more information than is really necessary for the purpose. The name, age and address of the patient is generally not necessary for any medical purpose. For instance, in post A the purpose of the post was to discuss the way the history of presenting illness was recorded. For that the name of the patient was not required at all. And that’s exactly was done in post B. In post B, the purpose was to get second opinion about antibiotics and the colleague rightly just posted the picture of the lab record without the identifying information.

With the widespread use of social media, it’s only natural for doctors to share information through posts like A and B to make their colleagues aware of different issues or to seek second opinion. However, it is also important that we should be mindful of respecting the privacy of our patients when we do so.