Authors:
A. Ferreira
1
;
L. Antunes
2
;
C. Pinho
3
;
C. Sá
3
;
E. Mendes
3
;
E. Santos
3
;
F. Silva
3
;
F. Sousa
3
;
F. Gomes
3
;
F. Abreu
3
;
F. Mota
3
;
F. Aguiar
3
;
F. Faria
3
;
F. Macedo
3
;
S. Martins
3
and
R. Cruz-Correia
3
Affiliations:
1
Computing Laboratory, University of Kent; Faculty of Science, University of Porto, Portugal
;
2
Faculty of Science, University of Porto, Portugal
;
3
Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto, CINTESIS, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Electronic Patient Record, access control, attitudes.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Confidentiality and Data Security
;
Health Information Systems
;
Hospital Management Systems
Abstract:
Access control to Electronic Patient Records (EPR) may greatly depend on users’ objectives and needs. The purpose of this study is to assess the opinions of medical doctors within a university hospital towards access control to an EPR. We selected a randomized sample of 58 doctors from a university hospital and 45 structured interviews were applied. 42 respondents (93%) agree with the existence of access control levels to patient information according to healthcare professionals’ category and 31 (69%) think that more sensitive information (e.g. HIV) should be accessed only by doctors that treat those patients. As 24 doctors (53%) feel that there is no need for them to see all information about all the patients, 41 (91%) think that nurses should not be able to do it also. Further, 31 doctors (69%) believe that patients themselves should not access their full medical record. These results show that it is very hard to get to a consensual policy regarding access control to EPR by its reg
ular users. There is therefore the need for a multidisciplinary agreement that can include healthcare professionals’ experiences and needs in order to define the most appropriate and efficient way to perform access control to the EPR.
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