Medical record privacy: is it a facade?

Abstract

Part of the job of healthcare providers is to manage patient information. Most is routine, but some is sensitive. For these reasons physicians' offices provide a rich environment for understanding complex, sensitive information management issues as they pertain to privacy and security. In this paper we present findings from interviews and observations of 15 offices in rural-serving southwest Virginia. Our work demonstrates how the current socio-technical system fails to meet the security needs of the patient. In particular, we found that the tensions between work practice and security, and between electronic and paper records resulted in insecure management of files.