In the process of receiving perinatal care, women living with HIV (WLWH) in Canada have experienced disclosure of their HIV status without their express consent. This disclosure often occurs by well-intentioned healthcare providers; however, from the perspective of WLWH, it is a breach of confidentiality and leaves WLWH to manage the consequences. This paper is a critical review of the regulato...

Healthcare consumers are increasingly concerned about security and the potential loss of privacy and the inability to control how their personal health information is used and disclosed. Core health information issues include what information should be collected; how the information should be handled, who should have access to the information, under what conditions the information should be dis...

The protection of individuals‘ sacred medical stories and a commitment to ―safeguard[ing] the confidentiality of medical records‖ have long been fundamental roles of the health information management (HIM) professional, inherent in the HIM profession throughout its 80-year history. 1 As the first decade of the 21st century approaches its conclusion, HIM professionals continue to carry out the r...

Electronic Personal Health Records (PHRs) has been perceived as the tool to empower consumers to become active decision-makers of their healthcare instead of leaving the decision to providers. However, there has been the lack of enthusiasm and adoption of PHRs. This paper examines the current healthcare climate and attempts to understand the major challenges associated with PHRs adoption. The p...

We describe the development of a model describing the use of patient information to improve patient recruitment in clinical trials. This model, named ePaIRing (electronic Participant Identification and Recruitment Model) describes variations in how information flows between stakeholders, and how personal health records can specifically facilitate patient recruitment.

This paper challenges the argument that data protection legislation may harm research by unduly restricting the flow of personal health information. I unpack the assumption that privacy is an individual right that must give way to research as a social good, and explore how data protection laws facilitate the flow of information for research purposes. I conclude that researchers should embrace d...

The electronic personal health record (PHR) has been championed as a mediator of patient-centered care, yet its usability and utility to patients, key predictors of success, have received little attention. Human-centered design (HCD) offers validated methods for studying systems effects on users and their cognitive tasks. In HCD, user-centered activities allow potential users to shape the desig...