Walsh Diana, Passerini Katia, Varshney Upkar, Fjermestad Jerry
School of Management, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA.
Int J Electron Healthc. 2008;4(3-4):311-26. doi: 10.1504/IJEH.2008.022668.
The conflict between the sweeping power of technology to access and assemble personal information and the ongoing concern about our privacy and security is ever increasing. While we gradually need higher electronic access to medical information, issues relating to patient privacy and reducing vulnerability to security breaches surmount. In this paper, we take a legal perspective and examine the existing patchwork of laws and obligations governing health information in the USA. The study finds that as Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) increase in scope and dissemination, privacy protections gradually decrease due to the shortcomings in the legal system. The contributions of this paper are (1) an overview of the legal EMR issues in the USA, and (2) the identification of the unresolved legal issues and how these will escalate when health information is transmitted over wireless networks. More specifically, the paper discusses federal and state government regulations such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and judicial intervention. Based on the legal overview, the unresolved challenges are identified and suggestions for future research are included.
技术获取和收集个人信息的强大力量与我们对隐私和安全的持续担忧之间的冲突日益加剧。虽然我们逐渐需要更高的电子方式来获取医疗信息，但与患者隐私以及降低安全漏洞风险相关的问题更为突出。在本文中，我们从法律角度审视了美国现有的关于健康信息的零散法律和义务。研究发现，随着电子病历（EMR）的范围扩大和传播，由于法律体系的缺陷，隐私保护逐渐减少。本文的贡献在于：（1）概述美国电子病历的法律问题；（2）识别未解决的法律问题以及当健康信息通过无线网络传输时这些问题将如何升级。更具体地说，本文讨论了联邦和州政府的法规，如《电子通信隐私法》、《健康保险流通与责任法案》（HIPAA）以及司法干预。基于法律概述，识别出未解决的挑战并包含了对未来研究的建议。
