Why is health care informational privacy an important topic for the Ethical Force program?
Protecting the privacy of sensitive, patient-identifiable health information is the first ethical topic area that the Ethical Force Oversight Body has chosen to address. In making this selection, the Oversight Body considered the rapid evolution of health care informatics and the potential that these advances provided, both to better protect patient information and to allow rapid, massive, and possibly silent breaches of patient confidentiality. When these possibilities were assessed — together with rising public concerns about health care privacy and the perception that there is a fundamental ethical obligation to carefully protect information given to health care providers in confidence and out of necessity — the Oversight Body felt that protecting privacy was a clear example of an ethical obligation that must span the entire health care system.
