Addressing Public Health informatics patient privacy concerns

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review stakeholder perspectives and provide a framework for improving governance in health data stewardship. Patients may wish to view their own lab results or clinical records, but others (notably academics, journalists and lawyers) tend to want scores of patient records in their search for patterns or trends. Public Health informatics capabilities are growing in scope and speed as clinical information systems, health information exchange networks and other potential database linkages enable more access to healthcare data. This change facilitates novel service improvements, but also raises new personal privacy protection issues. Design/methodology/approach – This paper summarizes a panel session discussion from the 2015 Information Technology and Communication in Health biennial international conference. The perspectives of health service research, journalism, Public Health informatics and privacy protection were represented. Findings – In North America, an expec...