privacy
Ontario’s new diabetes registry – the end of patient privacy?
More and more doctors across Canada are using electronic medical records to keep track of their patients’ health information. Finding a patient’s information record in most electronic medical databases involves entering the first few letters of each name, hitting <Enter> and choosing the appropriate person from the resulting drop-down list. Recently while looking up one …
Who controls how patient information is shared in Ontario?
Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner recently ordered Cancer Care Ontario to stop sending paper copies of screening reports containing personal health information to physicians. However, a massive amount of personal health information is mailed or faxed every day in Ontario. The implications of this order to information sharing and transfer across the health care …
Should patients have better access to their medical records?
Patients are increasingly interested in reading the information in their own medical records. Canadian laws and existing technologies support this in principle. However, most patients are not yet easily able to access their medical records in practice. Canadians today have easy access to a range of systems that store their personal information. The difference between …