Confidential health care for adolescents: position paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine.

• Confidentiality protection is an essential component of health care for adolescents because it is consistent with their development of maturity and autonomy and without it, some adolescents will forgo care. • Confidential health care should be available, especially to encourage adolescents to seek health care for sensitive concerns and to ensure that they provide complete and candid information to their health care providers. • Health care professionals should educate adolescent patients and their families about the meaning and importance of confidentiality, the scope of confidentiality protection, and the limits to confidentiality. • Health care professionals should support effective communication between adolescents and their parents or other caretakers. Participation of parents in the health care of their adolescents should usually be encouraged, but should not be mandated. • Health care professionals and delivery systems should review and, if necessary, revise their procedures (including scheduling, billing, and recordkeeping) to ensure that adolescents’ privacy and the confidentiality of their health information are protected to the extent possible. • Health care professionals should receive education and ongoing training to ensure that they know and understand the state and federal consent and confidentiality laws relevant to the delivery of health services to adolescents and have the skills to apply these laws when delivering clinical care. • Laws that allow minors to give their own consent for all or some types of health care and that protect the confidentiality of adolescents’ health care information are fundamentally necessary to allow health care professionals to provide appropriate health care to adolescents and should be maintained. • Research related to confidentiality and adolescent health care should be placed within a broad research agenda focused on finding ways to increase the numbers of adolescents who receive high quality health care for the wide range of health issues important in this age group. Future research should investigate the impact of providing or limiting confidential adolescent health services on specific health outcomes, inform strategies to address system-level barriers to provision of confidential adolescent services, and define ways that health care professionals can encourage parentteen communication without losing the trust of adolescent patients.