How will sharing information about a patient between health care practitioners to directly improve that patients care be affected by the Ethical Force recommendations?
The primary use of a patient’s personal health information should be to better care for that patient. Indeed, patients assume that the information they give to physicians and other health practitioners will be used primarily, if not solely, for their direct benefit — as they should. Thus, protecting confidential health information should do two things. First, it should allow patients to entrust sensitive information to their caregivers without fear that the information will be used to harm them in any way. Second, it should allow them to do so in the comfort that the information will be used as effectively as possible to help them avoid illness or get better if they are ill. For these reasons, consent to use and share information for the direct therapeutic benefit of a patient may generally be presumed when the patient presents for care. But by the same token, any use of information beyond this must require additional ethical justification.
