Medical records: Disclosing confidential clinical information

Ethical, professional, and legal obligations in clinical practice: a series of discussion topics for postgraduate medical education. Topic 5: disclosing confidential information.

This is the last discussion topic in a series of five dealing with ethical, professional, and legal obligations of clinical practice. Junior doctors tend to lack confidence in these subjects, and thus I organised a series of informal discussions in our surgical unit on which these discussion articles are based. The sessions were prepared with reference to nonacademic literature readily availabl...

Consent for release of confidential disciplinary records.

Information Discovery on Electronic Medical Records

As the use of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) becomes more widespread, so does the need to search and provide effective information discovery on them. Information discovery methods will allow practitioners and other healthcare stakeholders to locate relevant pieces of information in the growing corpus of available EMRs. The success of Web search engines has shown that keyword queries are a us...

Arguing with Confidential Information

While researchers have looked at many aspects of argumentation, an area often neglected is that of argumentation strategies. That is, given multiple possible arguments that an agent can put forth, which should be selected in what circumstances. In this paper, we propose a heuristic that implements one such strategy. The heuristic assigns a utility cost to revealing information, as well as a uti...

From medical records to clinical science.

Medical records contain an abundance of information, very little of which is extracted and put to clinical use. Increasing the flow of information from medical records to clinical practice requires methods of analysis that are appropriate for large nonintervention studies. The purpose of this article is to explain in nontechnical language what these methods are, how they differ from conventiona...