J Korean Soc Med Inform.  1999 Dec;5(3):63-76.

A Survey on the Attitude of Social Groups toward Security, Privacy, and Confidentiality of Health Information: An Original Paper Authors and Affiliations

• Kim HE
• Kim JH

Abstract

To investigate the attitude towards the security, privacy, and confidentiality of health information, authors surveyed patient, physician, nurse, medical student, nursing student, medical record manager, and health management student groups. Most of the subject hoped that the health information should be treated as a secret. They answered that the information could be shared for the social good when necessary, the ownership and the right to decide the disclosure should belong to patient, and patient should be allowed to access their own information with certain degree of regulation. More than half of the clinical workers answered that they have disclosed patient' s secret for non-medical reasons within a year but they denied any potential harm to their patients. Patients expected that their health information were being securely treated, gave the lowest grade to security violation risk, and showed the most generous attitude towards disclosing and sharing their information than other groups. However, when they are asked the same questions for detailed items such as identification, diagnosis, cause of admission, past medical history and so forth, they showed the strictest attitude to most of the situations and items to disclose their information. Different attitudes toward the information security among the different social groups was demonstrated as a potential cause of social conflict. The attitude change of the patients with the different level of granularity of questions suggests that investigators should be cautious when they conduct and interpretate the attitude toward the security, privacy, and security aspects of health information.

Keyword

Health Information; Medical Record; Security; Privacy; Confidentiality

MeSH Terms

Confidentiality*
Diagnosis
Disclosure
Hope
Humans
Medical Records
Ownership
Privacy*
Research Personnel
Students, Medical
Students, Nursing