The recent explosion of blogs written by medical professionals is creating problems for patient privacy, according to a recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study, which recommends that professional organizations and medical schools get involved in creating ethical guidelines and standards.
Authors of these blogs rarely violate privacy overtly, the study’s authors said, but even anonymous bloggers can reveal enough about their location and sub-specialties that it’s often not hard for patients, their families and friends to figure out who the blogger is and whom they are writing about.
As with many other people who blog, doctors and other medical professionals who put personal details out on the Internet don’t realize that it’s a very open space, said Dr. Tara Lagu, a foundation clinical scholar and one of the study’s authors.
“I don’t think it’s something these bloggers do consciously, and for the most part they seem to be committed to privacy standards,” she said. “But they don’t realize that giving up information about themselves can also affect their patients’ privacy.”
The study by Lagu and her fellow researchers at the University of Pennsylvania examined 271 medical blogs and found that more than half contained enough information to reveal the blogger’s identity. Individual patients were described in 114 of the blogs and were portrayed negatively in 48 of them.
The study also found that some of the blogs allowed advertisements and even promoted various products, without the conflict-of-interest flags that medical ethics standards require.
The main problem is that there is no training on privacy for medical bloggers, Lagu said. Many medical school classes include ethics and privacy standards as a large part of the education in medical school classes, she added.
“Even a 10-minute session during a class would help to drive home the need to safeguard privacy in blogs,” she said.
Blogs have become very useful tools for medical professionals to share knowledge and communicate with their peers, Lagu said, but as they proliferate it’s urgent that professional organizations, medical schools and even bloggers themselves come together to create ethical guidelines and standards for blogs.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
