WPAC The Role of the Patient
Patient Privacy Policies
In order to lawfully collect, store, process, and communicate medical information about a patient, a concrete and prior authorisation for those operations is required. This authorisation is also referred to as the patient consent. This consent is the result of a patient's decision and is specifically defining:
- What of his medical data may be shared
- to what extent (partly, context-based, all)
- with whom (identities or organisations)
- for how long?
Finding a suitable technical representation of the patient's consent is considered to be quite challenging due to the potentially high complexity of an adequate reflection of the concrete patient's wishes. Furthermore, it must be adequately addressed, that the patient holds the right to withdraw his consent at any time, even during the treatment.
One very potential solution to express the patient's consent, while fully respecting the variables such as immediate withdrawal, flexible rights extension or regulation, and automatic checks whether the consent is currently valid, may be a structured collection of rules and regulations: a policy.