Sharing Patient Information: A Survey of Patients' Views

The current policies of the governments of Australia and New Zealand encourage the use of electronic information systems to exchange patient information between various stakeholders. However, little research has been undertaken to investigate the attitudes of patients toward sharing their personal health information. This paper presents the findings of a questionnaire survey of adult primary care patients in New Zealand. The results indicate that whilst patients are willing to have their information shared between healthcare professionals, they are increasingly unwilling for the information to be distributed to other stakeholders, such as administrators, researchers or other government departments. The findings also indicate that patients would prefer to be consulted about the distribution of their information. These findings indicate that in order to be acceptable to patients, future clinical information systems should incorporate flexible access control mechanisms which can be tailored to patients' individual preferences.